Article
7 min read time
Executive Summary
The stablecoin market has crossed $300 billion in total market capitalization, and US dollar-pegged assets - crypto assets that work as fiat currency representations onchain - account for roughly 98% of that figure. The cryptocurrency market treats these tokens as interchangeable due to their main quality - maintaining a stable value against a fiat currency. But the onchain data tells a different story.
In our second joint report with Range, Dollar Supremacy, we analyzed the distribution of the five leading stablecoins - Tether USDT, USD Coin (USDC), USDe, PYUSD, and USDG - across Ethereum and Solana. The data, covering approximately $180 billion in digital assets at rest, reveals that each token has evolved into a fundamentally different financial product: held by different entities, concentrated in different venues, and serving different use cases.
The key differences between USDC and USDT alone - in holder composition, venue concentration, and risk profile - challenge the assumption that stablecoin selection is a neutral decision. For financial institutions, payment companies, and fintechs trying to bridge the traditional financial system to the onchain one by building on modular stablecoin infrastructure, understanding these concentration patterns is no longer optional.
Five Key Takeaways
1. Same dollar peg, five different products
The stablecoin crypto market looks unified at the surface - every token targets a $1 peg backed by reserve assets. But the composition of those reserves varies widely between the different stablecoin issuers (treasury bills and cash equivalents for USDT and USDC stablecoins, corporate bonds and commercial paper in some cases, crypto collateral for USDe), and so does where the tokens end up. Beneath the shared peg, the distribution data tells a different story.
USDT functions primarily as an exchange settlement layer: 57% of supply sits on centralized crypto exchanges, with Binance alone holding 40%.
USDe operates as a decentralized finance yield instrument - effectively a yield farming vehicle - with 63% deployed in DeFi protocols and 60% locked in a single staking contract.
USDC has the broadest distribution across both CEX and DeFi ecosystems.
PYUSD concentrates in lending protocols like Spark and Kamino.
USDG, the newest entrant, is overwhelmingly Solana-native at 71.5% of supply.
The practical implication: comparing USDT vs USDC - or any pairing of fiat backed stablecoins - on market cap alone misses the point. USD Coin's market capitalization of $62 billion and Tether's $107 billion measure issuance, not function. Where the tokens actually sit determines the counterparty exposure, liquidity profile, and operational risk a firm inherits by choosing one over another.
2. Three exchanges control 36% of the entire stablecoin market
Concentration in the stablecoin market extends well beyond individual tokens. Binance, OKX, and Coinbase collectively hold approximately $64 billion - 36% of the combined supply of all five stablecoins analyzed. Binance's position alone (~$46 billion across USDT, USDC, and USDe) exceeds the entire circulating supply of USDe, PYUSD, and USDG combined.
This matters for anyone relying on fiat collateralized stablecoins for settlement, treasury, or cross border payments, especially those exploring stablecoin-powered payments infrastructure. A disruption at a single exchange wouldn't just affect trading - it would ripple across the liquidity infrastructure that global payments and decentralized finance protocols depend on. The ecosystem is shallower than its $300 billion market cap suggests, and the dependency on centralized exchange custody remains a structural feature, not a temporary condition.
3. The stablecoin transparency gap is smaller than it looks
USDC has 38% of its Ethereum supply sitting in unattributed addresses - the weakest attribution coverage of any stablecoin analyzed. That sounds like a transparency gap. But the report's onchain forensics reveal that exchanges use highly structured wallet architectures: OKX maintains 82 USDT wallets in round-number $500M and $600M denominations; Coinbase Prime distributes USDC across clusters of identically sized cold wallets. These patterns make institutional custody identifiable even when addresses carry no label.
The attribution gap is a tooling problem, not a fundamental anonymity issue. Consider the contrast in issuer transparency: Circle publishes monthly audits of USDC reserves through a major accounting firm and operates under NYDFS regulation. Tether's reserves are disclosed through quarterly attestations that leave the exact breakdown of holdings ambiguous. Both issuers are regulated financial institutions, but full transparency means different things depending on who you ask.
As regulatory frameworks like MiCA and the GENIUS Act take root, the pressure on issuers and their counterparties to close the remaining attribution gaps - through reserve transparency, regular audits, and better onchain tooling - will intensify. Financial authorities overseeing banking system stability are increasingly treating stablecoin transparency as a prerequisite, not a preference. As these assets grow large enough to influence price stability in the broader financial system, the regulatory mandate to close attribution gaps is accelerating.
4. Solana is already a major stablecoin settlement layer
Newer stablecoins are making a decisive bet on Solana. USDG has 71.5% of its supply on the chain, with OKX (25%) and Kraken (14%) as its largest holders. PYUSD has grown its Solana share from 14% to 28%, with its holder base expanding 60x to over 31,000 addresses. Even USDC - despite being Ethereum-native by design - commands $9.1 billion on Solana, more than double USDT's $3.7 billion presence there.
For fintechs and payment companies evaluating stablecoin infrastructure across multiple blockchains, Solana is no longer an emerging option in the broader context of the rise of stablecoins in payments. It's an active settlement layer with meaningful institutional custody (Squads multisig vaults hold nearly $1 billion across tokens), growing DeFi protocol integration, and low fees that appeal to high-frequency, low-value use cases like cross border transactions and retail payouts. Transaction volume on Solana continues to grow showing clear market demand, and the chain's stablecoin infrastructure is maturing in parallel.
5. Stablecoin choice is now an infrastructure decision
Utila CEO and Co-Founder Bentzi Rabi contributed an opinion piece to the report arguing that the concentration patterns revealed in this data carry direct operational consequences for firms. A company settling through USDT inherits a dependency on Binance's custody infrastructure. A firm using USDe for yield is exposed to a single smart contract holding 60% of all issued tokens. Even USDC, the most broadly distributed stablecoin in this analysis, concentrates meaningfully in institutional custody and lending protocols.
Rabi's argument: as the stablecoin market becomes more differentiated - more issuers, more distribution models, more regulatory regimes - firms need modular infrastructure that lets them work across stablecoins without being locked into a single issuer's counterparty structure. The firms best positioned for what comes next will be those whose infrastructure allows them to shift counterparties, liquidity routes, and workflows as the market evolves, rather than inheriting dependencies they didn't choose.
Download the Full Report
This blog covers five headline findings - but the full Dollar Supremacy report goes significantly deeper. Across 60+ pages and more than 20 charts and data tables, the report provides the kind of granular, token-level analysis that compliance teams, treasury managers, and product leaders need to evaluate stablecoin exposure.
Inside the report, you'll find detailed profiles for each of the five stablecoins - USDT, USDC, USDe, PYUSD, and USDG - including top-10 holder breakdowns, CEX vs. DeFi distribution splits, and chain-by-chain concentration data. The report also covers topics we haven't touched here: how exchanges engineer their cold wallet architectures (and why that matters for on-chain attribution), which DeFi protocols hold meaningful positions across multiple stablecoins, the growth of multisig wallet adoption on both Ethereum and Solana, and a full risk assessment covering entity concentration, smart contract dependency, and chain risk.
The Partner Perspectives section features opinion pieces from leaders at Utila, Agora, M0, Altitude, Bitso, and Mento - each addressing how stablecoin concentration shapes infrastructure decisions for payment companies, fintechs, and enterprises operating across emerging markets.
Whether you're assessing counterparty exposure, evaluating stablecoin allocation for treasury, or building products on stablecoin infrastructure, this is the most comprehensive public dataset on where USD stablecoins actually sit.
Download the full report here.
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