I noticed an interesting paradox: everyone talks about 300 billion dollars in stablecoins, but almost no one understands what is really happening there. Who is holding this money? How quickly does it move? On which networks does it operate? Dune recently released a serious dataset together with Steakhouse Financial, revealing much more than just volume figures.

As of January 2026, the top 15 stablecoins on EVM, Solana, and Tron reached 304 billion dollars. USDT and USDC still dominate with 89% of the market, but 2025 showed that competition is really gaining momentum. USDS grew by 376%, PYUSD by 753%, and RLUSD simply skyrocketed from 58 million to 1.1 billion — a growth of 1803%. Even newcomers like USD1 appeared from zero and reached 5 billion.

But here’s what’s really interesting: 172 million addresses hold at least one of these tokens. Sounds impressive until you look at the concentration. USDT and USDC are distributed quite evenly — the top 10 wallets hold only 23-26% of the supply. But USDS, USDF, USD0 — that’s a completely different story. 90% of USDS is concentrated in ten wallets, and USD0 has 99%. This doesn’t mean something is wrong, it’s just that these are young projects or the result of a conscious strategy. But data should be read with this context in mind.

In January, transfer volume reached $10.3 trillion — more than twice as much as a year ago. And here’s what’s surprising: Base, with only $4.4 billion in supply, leads in transactions with $5.9 trillion. Ethereum — $2.4 trillion. This shows that the speed of circulation on different networks varies dramatically.

USDC moves almost five times faster than USDT, despite being three times smaller in volume. On Base, the average daily velocity of USDC reaches 14 times — high-frequency trading in DeFi. On Ethereum and Solana — about once a day. And USDT on Ethereum is only 0.2 times — over 100 billion just sitting idle.

As for what these tokens are actually doing: 90% of the volume passes through identified activity categories. The largest scenario is liquidity on DEX (5.9 trillion). Then comes interaction with exchanges: deposits, withdrawals, internal transfers (totaling about 6 trillion). Next are lending operations, borrowing, arbitrage. Stablecoins are primarily infrastructure for trading and settlements, not just a means of savings.

And here’s what’s especially interesting: the dataset tracks not only dollar stablecoins. There are already over 200 tokens representing 20+ currencies. Euro, Brazilian real, Japanese yen, Nigerian naira, Kenyan shillings, South African rand, Turkish lira, Indonesian rupiah, Singapore dollar. The non-dollar stablecoins volume is currently only 1.2 billion, but that’s already 59 tokens across six continents. Infrastructure for local currencies is being built right now, and this could be much more significant than it seems at first glance. When people talk about 230 euros to naira or other cross-currency pairs, it becomes clear that blockchain opens entirely new possibilities for global payments, which were previously simply inaccessible or incredibly expensive.