DIA Research Report 2026
Stablecoins now hold $299.6 billion, and $297.9 billion of that is pegged to the US dollar.
Map figures as of October 20, 2026. Live numbers on the map.
Map figures as of October 20, 2026. Live numbers on the map.
Stablecoins now hold $299.6 billion, and $297.9 billion of that is pegged to the US dollar. The other $1.7 billion is spread across 24 other currencies, from the euro and the yen to the Turkish lira and the Nigerian naira. A single ruble token, A7A5, accounts for $0.57 billion of that. Much of this year's news has been about that smaller share: new licensing regimes in Europe and Asia, banks issuing their own tokens and new issuers far from the dollar. Euro stablecoins grew 54% in dollar terms in the past year. Dollar stablecoin supply fell 1.3%, or $3.9 billion, because synthetic dollars shrank; fiat-backed dollars were flat.
This report calls the result fragmentation. From a distance the market looks uniform, with one peg dominating. Up close it is breaking into many products, each with its own issuers, chains, users and purpose. For anyone building on stablecoins or allocating to them, a coin's reported supply says little about how it is used, and for several currencies, little about whether it is used at all.
Four questions run through the report. Is the market splitting into rival currencies, or into competing products within each currency? What builds a local-currency market: regulation, payment infrastructure, or loss of faith in the local currency? Where are capital and new issuers going? And how much of what gets reported can be verified? This chapter answers them for the dollar, where the fragmentation starts. The chapters that follow take them region by region, and the last sets out what the answers mean for business.
USDT and USDC are both dollar stablecoins, but they have little else in common. Tether launched USDT in 2014 as the dollar crypto exchanges used to settle with one another, and still issues it from outside the United States. Circle, a US company, launched USDC four years later. USDT now stands at $183.0 billion, about two and a half times USDC's $72.4 billion.
The clearest difference is where each coin lives. Of the $193.4 billion of USDT minted, $94.2 billion sits on Tron, where it is 98.4% of all dollar stablecoins, $88.3 billion on Ethereum and $9.2 billion on BNB Chain; $10.5 billion is held in Tether's treasury and is not in circulation. USDC holds nearly two-thirds of its minted supply on Ethereum ($47.7 billion), and the rest is spread across 46 other chains, led by Solana ($7.6 billion), Hyperliquid ($6.5 billion) and Base ($4.3 billion). USDC is 88% of dollar stablecoins on Base and 46% on Solana, twice USDT's 23%.
Those chains reflect use. The USDT on Tron barely touches DeFi: Tron's DeFi pools hold only about $137 million of it. USDT lending totals $6.2 billion, of which $5.3 billion is borrowed. Ethereum holds $4.4 billion or 70%, Plasma $0.8 billion and BNB Chain $0.3 billion. USDC is lent across 21 chains, led by Ethereum ($5.7 billion), Base ($2.8 billion) and Solana ($847 million).
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