I recently looked at the latest stablecoin data set from Dune and found some pretty interesting things.

On the surface, the stablecoin market is just over $300 billion in size, with USDT and USDC accounting for 89%. But when you dig deeper, the story is completely different.

Let’s start with supply. As of recently, USDT’s circulating supply is about $190 billion, and USDC is around $78 billion. These two are definitely the absolute duopolists. What’s interesting, though, is that the “challenger” stablecoins saw outrageous growth in 2025—USDS grew by 376%, PYUSD rose by 753%, and Ripple’s RLUSD shot up by 1803%. Of course, not everything succeeded: USD0 fell by 66%, but overall, the market is becoming more diverse.

The most worth paying attention to is the holder structure. Exchanges are still the largest stablecoin holders, at about $80 billion. But what’s truly interesting is the difference in concentration—USDT and USDC are distributed quite widely, with the top 10 wallets accounting for only 23–26% of the supply. Other stablecoins are different. Some newer coins have over 90% of their supply held by the top 10 wallets. Whether that’s due to mechanism design or hidden risks, you need to make sure you understand it clearly.

As for on-chain activity, transfers in January reached $10.3 trillion. But the number itself isn’t that important—the key is where the money flows. The biggest use case is DEX liquidity—$5.9 trillion. Next are flash loans and lending activities, at about $1.3 trillion. Then come exchange deposits and withdrawals, at $599 billion. This shows that stablecoins mainly serve as trading infrastructure rather than payment tools.

There’s also an overlooked metric called velocity. USDC on Base has a daily weekly turnover rate of 14x, which is an insane number and reflects high-frequency DeFi activity. But on Ethereum, USDT’s turnover rate is only 0.2x—more than $100 billion in supply is basically idle. The same token behaves completely differently depending on which chain it’s on, and that really illustrates the issue.

One more detail: non-USD stablecoins are on the rise. There are already 17 euro stablecoins, with a total supply of $990 million. And there are stablecoins pegged to various local currencies such as the Brazilian real, the Japanese yen, the naira, the shilling, the rand, and more that have launched. The market is far more complex than it looks on the surface.

Overall, the stablecoin market has evolved from “USDT and USDC dominance” into a stage of “diverse competition + segmented use cases.” Looking only at supply isn’t enough—you need to see who’s using them, how they’re being used, and how fast they’re being used. That’s the key to understanding the true reality of this market.