The supply of dollar-denominated tokens on public blockchains set a record. It is the single cleanest measure of how much capital is positioned to settle in this market, and it is one of the few series here that cannot be inflated by turnover.
What the data shows
- Total circulating supply was $313.8bn on 18 March 2026, above the previous peak of $313.7bn on 14 March 2026.
- Supply is +2.5% over thirty days and +1.8% over ninety.
- USDT accounts for 61.2% of the total and USDC for 26.5%.
- 6 issuers carry more than a billion dollars in circulation.
Total stablecoin circulating supply
All dollar-pegged tokens, 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.
