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 | $159.7bn | 53.8% |
| Tron | $85.6bn | 28.9% |
| BSC | $16.3bn | 5.5% |
| Solana | $15.9bn | 5.4% |
| Base | $4.6bn | 1.6% |
| Hyperliquid | $4.5bn | 1.5% |
| Arbitrum | $4.3bn | 1.5% |
| Polygon | $3.3bn | 1.1% |
Stablecoin supply on Ethereum
Daily, in dollars.
Source: DeFiLlama, daily series. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Where the reserves sit
The largest fiat-backed issuers hold most of their reserves in short-dated Treasury bills, which makes the aggregate supply figure a rough proxy for a pool of demand at the front end of the curve. That is the mechanism by which this market touches the one an allocator already runs, and it is why the size of the deposit base is worth tracking even by somebody who will never hold a token.
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.
