The most consequential fact about the stablecoin market is not its size but how few balance sheets it sits on. Two issuers carry most of it, and the gap between them and everything else is wider than the league table suggests.
| Issuer | Circulating | Share | Backing | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USDT | $189.6bn | 62.0% | fiat-backed | Tether |
| USDC | $77.1bn | 25.2% | fiat-backed | Circle |
| USDS | $8.3bn | 2.7% | crypto-backed | Sky |
| USD1 | $4.8bn | 1.6% | fiat-backed | World Liberty Financial |
| DAI | $4.6bn | 1.5% | crypto-backed | Sky, formerly MakerDAO |
| USDe | $4.4bn | 1.5% | crypto-backed | Ethena |
| PYUSD | $3.6bn | 1.2% | fiat-backed | PayPal, issued by Paxos |
| USYC | $3.0bn | 1.0% | fiat-backed | Circle, formerly Hashnote |
Six months ago the same two names held 89.4%. The market has added issuers without meaningfully redistributing supply, which is the pattern to expect when distribution rather than product decides the outcome.
USDT circulating supply
The largest issuer, 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.
