I delved into the latest Dune data on stablecoins and honestly, it's much more interesting than just looking at the circulation figures we see everywhere. Beyond the 300 billion dollars in circulation, there are really fascinating patterns if you dig a little deeper.

The first thing that struck me is that USDT and USDC dominate with 89% of the market, but 2025 was really the year when challengers woke up. PYUSD exploded by 753%, USDS rose by 376%, and RLUSD multiplied its supply by 18. It's clearly no coincidence — you see Meta, PayPal, and Ripple seriously pushing on stablecoin payments.

But here’s the truly revealing thing: when you look at who holds these tokens, it's two completely different worlds. For USDT and USDC, the distribution is broad; the top 10 wallets control only 23-26% of the supply. On the other hand, for newcomers like USDS or USDF, it's ultra-concentrated — the top 10 hold 60 to 99% of the supply. That totally changes how you interpret these numbers.

In January, transfer volume hit $10.3 trillion — more than double compared to January 2025. And here’s the interesting part: Base leads with $5.9 trillion despite only having a supply of just $4.4 billion. USDC circulates 14 times faster than its supply on Base, whereas USDT on Ethereum only circulates at 0.2 times — so just $100 billion sitting there.

What really caught my attention is how stablecoins play completely different roles depending on their context. USDT on Tron is a stable cross-border payment channel. USDC on Layer 2s is a hyper-active DeFi infrastructure. And when you look beyond the dollar — euros, Brazilian reals, even euro-to-naira conversions for African markets — you see that the infrastructure for local currency stablecoins is really building now. Already 59 tokens available across six continents, representing 30% of all tokens in the study.

What’s cool about this dataset is that it doesn’t just say “10 trillion have been transferred.” It shows you why — $5.9 trillion just for DEX liquidity, $1.3 trillion in flash loans, $5.9 trillion in CEX flows. It gives you real granularity on where the money is moving and for what purpose. The questions we can now ask go well beyond the simple circulation figures you see in each report.