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 | $165.8bn | 56.2% |
| Tron | $80.9bn | 27.4% |
| BSC | $15.7bn | 5.3% |
| Solana | $13.4bn | 4.6% |
| Hyperliquid | $4.9bn | 1.6% |
| Arbitrum | $4.7bn | 1.6% |
| Base | $4.6bn | 1.6% |
| Polygon | $3.0bn | 1.0% |
Stablecoin supply on Ethereum
Daily, in dollars.
Source: DeFiLlama, daily series. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
What settlement volume does not tell you
Transfer volume is the figure most often quoted for this market, and it is close to meaningless without context, because one dollar moved a thousand times reports as a thousand dollars. Supply cannot be inflated that way. It counts tokens that exist, each of which required somebody to fund it.
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.
