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 | $186.8bn | 63.6% | fiat-backed | Tether |
| USDC | $74.5bn | 25.3% | fiat-backed | Circle |
| USDS | $6.5bn | 2.2% | crypto-backed | Sky |
| USDe | $6.5bn | 2.2% | crypto-backed | Ethena |
| DAI | $4.6bn | 1.6% | crypto-backed | Sky, formerly MakerDAO |
| PYUSD | $3.7bn | 1.3% | fiat-backed | PayPal, issued by Paxos |
| USD1 | $3.4bn | 1.2% | fiat-backed | World Liberty Financial |
| USYC | $1.6bn | 0.5% | fiat-backed | Circle, formerly Hashnote |
Six months ago the same two names held 90.6%. 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.
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.
