I just reviewed the latest Dune data on stablecoins and there are some interesting things I hadn't noticed before. At the beginning of the year, the total supply of the main stablecoins reached $304 billion, a nearly 50% jump compared to the previous year. USDT and USDC continue to dominate with 89% of the market, but what's curious is that new players are growing significantly: PayPal's PYUSD grew 753%, Sky's USDS increased 376%, and USD1 went from zero to $5.1 billion.

But what really caught my attention is who holds these coins. It was assumed there were 172 million addresses with stablecoins, but it turns out that USDT and USDC are quite distributed (only 23-26% in the top 10 wallets), while others like USDS have 90% concentrated in just 10 wallets. That says a lot about the actual risk of each.

Regarding movement, in January the transfer volume was $10.3 trillion, double what it was a year ago. The interesting part is that Base led with $5.9 trillion despite having only $4.4 billion in supply. USDC showed a much higher circulation velocity than USDT, nearly five times more volume with less supply.

What I find important is that 90% of this volume flows into DEX and CEX, confirming that stablecoins remain mainly trading infrastructure. And something that went unnoticed: the dataset now tracks over 200 stablecoins across 20 different currencies. Euros, Brazilian reais, yen, Nigerian naira... the infrastructure for local currencies is being built on-chain. It’s still small (only $1.2 billion), but it’s growing across six continents. Interesting to see how this evolves.