A dollar token is not one instrument. The same ticker on two chains has different settlement finality, different transfer cost, a different validator set and a different answer to the question of who can stop a transaction. For a treasurer deciding where to hold working capital, the chain is the counterparty question.
| Chain | Stablecoin supply | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | $159.2bn | 54.4% |
| Tron | $84.3bn | 28.8% |
| BSC | $16.2bn | 5.5% |
| Solana | $13.8bn | 4.7% |
| Base | $4.6bn | 1.6% |
| Arbitrum | $4.6bn | 1.6% |
| Hyperliquid | $4.5bn | 1.5% |
| Polygon | $3.1bn | 1.0% |
Stablecoin supply on Ethereum
Daily, in dollars.
Source: DeFiLlama, daily series. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
The balance sheet question
Every token in these figures is a liability. The useful distinction is not between stablecoins and other digital assets but between issuers: a fiat-backed token is a claim on cash and short-dated Treasuries held by a named company, and a crypto-backed token is a claim on collateral held in a smart contract and marked to a volatile market. Those are different instruments with the same ticker convention, and an allocator that treats them as one line item has mispriced the risk.
How this was measured
- Supply figures are DeFiLlama’s daily circulating series for each issuer and chain, which count tokens in circulation rather than reserves held. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before, and every figure names the date it belongs to. Circulating supply is not the same as the assets backing it: what an issuer holds against its liability is disclosed on the issuer’s own schedule, and nothing here substitutes for an attestation. Chain figures count tokens native to or bridged onto that chain, so a token bridged between chains appears once on each side of the bridge in the chain view and once in the total.
