---
title: "Tron is USDT's first chain"
author: Mariusz Szyma
date: 2026-09-15
lang: en
canonical: https://szyma.co/en/blog/stablecoins/chains-and-distribution/
series: "Stablecoins: Past, Present and Future"
series_part: 6/11
series_url: https://szyma.co/en/blog/stablecoins/
data_as_of: 4–10 Sep 2026
---

# Tron is USDT's first chain

A dollar token can be deployed on a hundred networks. The ranking that decides who actually holds it, who trades it in DeFi, and who uses it to pay a person does not pick the same chain, and the chain that wins payments is the one built for cheap small transfers, not the one with the deepest validator set.

## What you'll learn

- Read a per-chain supply share against the base it divides by, and keep Ethereum's 48% of all stablecoins apart from a separate 65% of non-USD tokens.
- Explain why Tron, not Ethereum, holds most of USDT and most of the tracked P2P payment volume.
- Separate a stablecoin-first L1's launch TVL from the supply it still holds in September 2026.
- Name the nine paid channels between an issuer and a holder, and say which cuts are on the record.
- Tell a chain monoculture from a mixed book, and say which chains actually are one-token books.

## Where the 312 bn USD actually lives

On 4 September 2026 DefiLlama put all pegs at 312.0 bn USD. The same day's chain table, recovered in the chapter brief, is a different cut: Ethereum 147.15 bn USD (48.31%), Tron 93.70 bn USD (30.77%), Solana 16.21 bn USD (5.32%), BNB Chain 13.34 bn USD (4.38%), Hyperliquid L1 6.99 bn USD (2.29%). Those five shares add to about 91% of a chain-level total that sits a few billion below the all-pegs headline, because some smaller or unmapped chains do not enter the chain table. [Chapter 2](/en/blog/stablecoins/history/) already recorded that aggregator totals for the May 2026 peak disagree; the same warning applies here.

A second Ethereum figure circulates as if it were the same reading. Dune and Visa put Ethereum at about 65% of *non-USD* stablecoin supply, a different token set from the 48.31% of all stablecoins on the chain table. The 48–52% band that shows up in secondary write-ups is Ethereum's own-chain share of the whole dollar-stablecoin market, read on nearby dates. On 10 September 2026 a later DefiLlama chain table, recorded in the series research note, had Ethereum at 147.80 bn USD (48.32%) and Tron at 94.22 bn USD (30.80%). Those are six days later. They stay in Sources.

Of global USDT supply on 4 September 2026, Tron held 50.3% and Ethereum 40.0%. Tron is USDT's first chain. Ethereum is its second. The Polish edition's DefiLlama read the same day puts Tron at 97.9% USDT; the monoculture file recovered for the figure rounds that share to 98%. Both sit here.

[Chapter 3](/en/blog/stablecoins/types-and-pegs/) sorted tokens by what stands behind them. This chapter sorts the same tokens by which network they sit on, and then by who got paid to put them in front of a user.

![Stablecoin supply by chain, 4 Sep 2026: Ethereum 48.3%, Tron 30.8%, then a long tail of Solana, BNB Chain and Hyperliquid L1.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/supply-by-chain.4a5b4f44.svg)

## Why Tron: cheap small transfers

**Energy and Bandwidth** are Tron's two prepaid resource meters. Bandwidth pays for the bytes of a transaction. Energy pays for the computation. A holder who stakes about 5,000 TRX can send USDT at a recorded network fee of zero. A casual user who burns TRX instead pays 1–3 USD per transfer. Proposal #104, dated 29 August 2025, halved the energy unit price. Tether's GasFree program, which lets the fee be paid in USDT rather than in TRX, doubled gasless volume to 3 bn USD in 2026 from 1.5 bn USD in January. Those four figures are knowledge-base items via the chapter brief.

The Polish edition records a different cost for the staked path: about one cent per transfer with TRX staked, against 5–7% for a bank or a traditional remittance (TipRanks, April 2026). One cent and 1–3 USD are not the same user. The first is a heavy staker. The second is a casual burner. They are left as two prices.

The usage mix matches the fee. CoinDesk Research, 21 July 2026, put 93% of Tron's stablecoin transfer volume in peer-to-peer payments, the highest P2P share of any tracked chain. Messari, RWA.io and Stablecoin Insider, 7 January 2026, put Tron's 2025 USDT transfers at about 7.9 tn USD, with a daily average of 23.86 bn USD and 1.15 million accounts sending USDT in a day. The knowledge base, via the brief, puts Tron at 3.5 million daily active users, second only to Solana.

Tether Limited issues USDT. It does not have to prefer Ethereum, and it has not. The token is the same ERC-20-style contract on both networks. The user who sends 50 USD to a relative does not pay for a 27-validator debate. The Polish edition records 27 active validators on Tron, the most concentrated set among large networks, and a DeFi TVL about nine times smaller than Ethereum's. Tron still generates protocol fees that convert that P2P book into revenue: 82.2 mn USD in Q1 2026 and 89 mn USD in Q2 2026, second only to Hyperliquid (158 mn USD and 199 mn USD in those same quarters). Stablecoin dominance on a cheap chain is a fee business.

> **Example:** A 50 USD transfer that costs 5–7% on a traditional remittance loses 2.50–3.50 USD to the rail. The same transfer on Tron, for a staked user, is recorded at about one cent, and for a GasFree user is paid in USDT rather than in TRX. The architecture of the validator set is not the variable that selected the chain.

![The largest stablecoin's share of each chain's supply, 4 Sep 2026. Tron is a large USDT monoculture; Hyperliquid L1, X Layer and XRPL are smaller one-token books.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/chain-monoculture.e5274e9a.svg)

## The new stablecoin-first L1s still hold a rounding error

**A stablecoin-first L1** is a chain built so that the dollar token is the unit of gas and of account, rather than a guest contract on someone else's virtual machine. The 2025–2026 cohort in this material is Plasma (Tether), Stable (Bitfinex), Codex (Circle), Tempo (Stripe) and Arc (Circle). The shared promise is zero or near-zero fees, sub-second finality, and gas denominated in a stablecoin. None of them held more than a fraction of a percent of global supply as of September 2026.

Plasma is the largest of the five by on-chain stablecoin supply, and even that is 0.88–0.95 bn USD, 0.29% of the market, on DefiLlama's 4 September 2026 read. It opened a mainnet beta on 25 September 2025 with 2.0–2.04 bn USD of TVL seeded across more than a hundred DeFi protocols on day one, driven mainly by Aave V3, which itself peaked at 5.6–6.6 bn USD of TVL in mid-October 2025 (The Block, July–August 2026; Eco.com, June 2026). When Aave and other large protocols pulled capital, network TVL fell to 599 mn USD in April 2026, more than 90% below that peak. A second reading from the same publisher puts Plasma TVL at 18.7 bn USD in the second quarter of 2026. The two TVL figures are unreconciled. This chapter does not pick one. The supply figure, 0.88–0.95 bn USD, is the number that can be dated to 4 September 2026.

Codex, backed by Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures and Circle Ventures, opened mainnet on 24 June 2025 after a 16 mn USD round. USDC supply on Codex was 52.33 mn USD on 27 January 2026 (IQ.wiki, January 2026), an order of magnitude below Plasma's September supply.

Tempo, incubated by Stripe, raised 500 mn USD at a 5 bn USD valuation in October 2025 and opened mainnet on 18 March 2026, announcing a Machine Payments Protocol the same day. External validators Stripe, Visa and Zodia Custody joined in April 2026. The network remains permissioned (Everstake, August 2026). On-chain scale in the Polish edition's DefiLlama read: Tempo's stablecoin DEX held 8.34 mn USD of TVL and printed 12.93 mn USD of volume in a 30-day window, against the 100,000-plus TPS the chain advertises.

Circle's Arc was still private as of the Polish edition, with a public mainnet announced for 16 September 2026, more than a hundred partners on the private network, and a testnet that had processed more than 244 million transactions by May 2026 (Circle press release, September 2026; KuCoin, August 2026). The knowledge base, via the brief, names Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock as Arc validators. Stable, Bitfinex's chain, is in the same cohort. No supply figure for it is in these sources, so none is stated.

> **Watch out:** Launch-day TVL of a new payments chain is a rented number. Plasma's day-one 2.0–2.04 bn USD and the later 599 mn USD reading are both dated. The 18.7 bn USD Q2 2026 reading is also dated, from the same publisher, and has not been reconciled with the April figure. Treat TVL of a new L1 as a protocol-flow metric, not as a supply share.

## Ethereum for DeFi depth, Tron for payment volume

Three metrics, three leaders.

Ethereum led DeFi TVL by 8.4× the next chain on the knowledge-base reading used here: 49.7 bn USD against Solana's 5.91 bn USD. That is the warehouse. Aave V3 alone, on the Polish DefiLlama read of 4 September 2026, held 17.68 bn USD of TVL. Hyperliquid L1 held 6.99 bn USD of stablecoins the same day, 97.9% of it USDC in the Polish edition, 98% in the monoculture file, more USDC than Base and Arbitrum together. On Hyperliquid the token is margin for perpetual futures, not a payment.

Tron carried 60–80% of real-economy stablecoin payment volume, down from about 74% in January 2025. That range is a knowledge-base item via the brief. Supply ranks Ethereum first, DeFi TVL ranks Ethereum first, and payment volume ranks Tron first. Three metrics, three leaders.

Circle Internet Financial issues USDC and still anchors most of that DeFi collateral use on Ethereum, while it builds Arc as its own stablecoin-first chain. Tether issues USDT and still anchors the P2P book on Tron. [Chapter 1](/en/blog/stablecoins/what-one-usdc-means/) treated those two tokens as the same three-layer construction. The construction is the same. The distribution is not.

The 2026 supply changes make the same split visible at the token level. From 1 January to 4 September 2026, recovered in the chapter brief, USDT moved −2% and USDC −1%. USDe fell 32% and PYUSD 16%. The fastest growers were USDY (+226%), USDG (+158%), RLUSD (+88%), BUIDL (+87%) and USYC (+77%). BUIDL, USYC and USDY are tokenized Treasuries. They do not target 1.00 USD. Their growth is a fund-subscription story, set out in [What an RWA actually is](/en/blog/rwa/what-is-an-rwa/), not a payments-chain story. USDG and RLUSD are newer fiat-backed tokens whose chain books are, on the monoculture file, concentrated: X Layer 93% USDG, XRPL 91% RLUSD.

**A chain monoculture** is a network whose stablecoin supply is almost entirely one token. The near-total cases in the recovered file are Tron (USDT), Hyperliquid L1 (USDC), X Layer (USDG) and XRPL (RLUSD). Ethereum, the largest chain by supply, is not on that list. Tron is both large and a monoculture. The three smaller one-token books are Hyperliquid L1, X Layer and XRPL. Calling every monoculture small would drop Tron, which the file does not.

![Supply change by token, 1 Jan–4 Sep 2026: USDT and USDC barely moved, USDe and PYUSD contracted, and newer tokens and tokenized Treasuries swung by double digits.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/supply-change-2026.72d5b7f6.svg)

## A token copies in weeks, a distribution channel does not

**A distribution channel** is a paid path between the issuer and the holder: an exchange listing, a wallet, a bank, a fintech, a payment-service provider, a merchant, a DeFi protocol, a bridge, or an institutional custodian. The contract is the easy part. A fully collateralized, attested token can be deployed in weeks. Exchange placement, wallet integration, DEX and lending listings, a bank-custodian mandate and a PSP deal cannot be copied on that timetable.

Circle's own numbers are the documented case. Coinbase holds more than 25% of USDC's circulating supply in its own products, about 19 bn USD on average, up from 5% in 2022. The 2024 cash figure in the Polish edition: Circle paid Coinbase 908 mn USD for USDC distribution that year. A later chapter walks the 50/100% reserve-yield split and the 58–62% quarterly distribution-cost band. The point for this chapter is simpler. The issuer that mints the token does not, on this record, control the screen the holder sees.

Paxos Trust Company issues USDG for the Global Dollar Network and uses DBS, Southeast Asia's largest bank, for reserve custody and cash management. That is a bank channel, not a contract feature. Ripple's RLUSD, 2.40 bn USD on 4 September 2026, is the dominant token on XRPL in the monoculture file. PayPal's PYUSD is a brand on Paxos's engine. In each case the issuer-as-a-service model and the distribution brand are different companies.

> **My take:** The copyable object is the ERC-20. The scarce object is the channel that already has the user, the licence, or the custody mandate. Tether won Tron the way it won Bitfinex in 2015: by being the dollar that the existing venue already ran.

## Nine channels, nine different cuts

The knowledge base lists nine channels. The table below keeps the cut that is on the record and leaves a blank where it is not. A blank is not a zero.

| Channel | What it does | Cut on the record | Named example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Centralised exchange | Lists the pair, holds balances, is often the first screen | Coinbase: 100% of reserve yield on USDC held on its platform, 50% of residual yield elsewhere; 908 mn USD paid by Circle in 2024 | Coinbase, Binance |
| Custodial / self-custody wallet | Holds keys, or holds them for the user | Not established as a separate fee in these sources | Exchange apps, self-custody |
| Bank | On/off-ramp, reserve custody, cash management | DBS as USDG reserve custodian | DBS, Circle Mint's banking edge |
| Fintech / neobank | Embeds the token in an existing app | Nubank: USDC as a first crypto purchase for one in four new Nubank Cripto investors, July 2025 | Nubank, Revolut |
| Payment-service provider | Settles a merchant in the token | Stripe: 1.5% flat versus the card-standard 2.9% + 0.30 USD | Stripe / Bridge, PayPal |
| Merchant | Accepts the token at checkout | Cross-border merchants lose 2–7% of each transaction to FX and correspondent banking; a firm processing 10 mn USD/month loses 200,000–700,000 USD/year on that | Stripe merchants, PayPal checkout |
| DeFi protocol | Lists the token as collateral, debt or margin | Not a cash cut in these sources; Hyperliquid's 6.99 bn USD book is the scale | Aave, Morpho, Hyperliquid |
| Bridge | Moves the token between chains | USDT0: more than 70 bn USD of cross-chain volume in under 12 months to 10 February 2026 (Tether.io) | CCTP, USDT0 |
| Institutional custodian / OTC | Holds keys for funds and desks; custody is itself a channel | Coinbase custodies 300 bn USD of assets and manages 80% of US crypto ETF assets under custody | Coinbase Prime, OTC desks |

Stripe's Bridge subsidiary received a conditional OCC national trust bank charter. The chapter brief dates that charter to February 2026. `content/blog/en/research/companies.md` records two dates for the same conditional approval, February 2025 in one source and 17 February 2026 in The Block. Both dates stay. They are not averaged. Bridge is the PSP that Stripe bought for a reported 1.1 bn USD, closed February 2025, and the Polish edition puts its stablecoin payment volume at about 400 bn USD, 60% of it B2B (Stripe annual letter, February 2026).

The merchant row is why the next chapter exists. A 2–7% FX and correspondent leak is the cost that a chain hop can cut. It is also a cost that UPI and Pix never charged. The payments chapter takes the 33–35 tn USD headline apart and puts those two domestic rails next to the cross-border case.

![A stablecoin reaches a user through up to nine paid channels between the issuer and the wallet, each taking its own cut, with known Circle, Stripe and Coinbase figures dated 2024–2026.](https://szyma.co/blog/img/distribution-stack.1bc70825.svg)

Company profiles of Tether, Circle, Coinbase, Stripe and Paxos sit in a later chapter. The RWA parallel, value parked versus value traded, is [Where RWA lives and where it trades](/en/blog/rwa/chains/).

## Key takeaways

1. On 4 September 2026 Ethereum held 147.15 bn USD of stablecoins (48.31%) and Tron 93.70 bn USD (30.77%); Tron held 50.3% of global USDT against Ethereum's 40.0%, so Tron is USDT's first chain.
2. Ethereum's ~65% share of non-USD stablecoin supply (Dune/Visa) is a different token set from its 48.31% of all stablecoins and is not a second reading of the same number.
3. Tron ran 93% of its stablecoin transfer volume as P2P (CoinDesk Research, 21 July 2026) and about 7.9 tn USD of USDT transfers in 2025; casual Tron users pay 1–3 USD in burned TRX, staked 5,000 TRX pays zero, and the Polish edition records about one cent on the staked path.
4. Plasma, the largest stablecoin-first L1 by supply, held 0.88–0.95 bn USD (0.29%) on 4 September 2026. Its TVL readings of 599 mn USD (April 2026) and 18.7 bn USD (Q2 2026) are unreconciled and are not settled here.
5. Ethereum led DeFi TVL 49.7 bn USD to Solana's 5.91 bn USD (8.4×). Tron carried 60–80% of real-economy payment volume, down from about 74% in January 2025. Supply, DeFi and payments are three rankings.
6. Coinbase holds more than 25% of USDC in its own products (about 19 bn USD average, up from 5% in 2022) and was paid 908 mn USD by Circle for distribution in 2024; Stripe charges merchants 1.5% against 2.9% + 0.30 USD for cards.
7. From 1 January to 4 September 2026 USDT moved −2% and USDC −1%, while USDY grew 226% and USDe fell 32%; the fastest growers include tokenized Treasuries that are not payment stablecoins.

## Glossary

- **Chain monoculture**: a network whose stablecoin supply is almost entirely one token. Tron is 97.9–98% USDT; Hyperliquid L1 is 97.9–98% USDC; X Layer is 93% USDG; XRPL is 91% RLUSD.
- **Energy / Bandwidth**: Tron's two prepaid resource meters. Bandwidth pays for transaction bytes; Energy pays for computation. About 5,000 TRX staked is the threshold the knowledge base records for a zero-fee send.
- **Stablecoin-first L1**: a chain that uses a dollar token as gas and as the unit of account. Plasma, Stable, Codex, Tempo and Arc are the 2025–2026 cohort in this material. None held more than a fraction of a percent of global supply as of September 2026.
- **Distribution channel**: a paid path between issuer and holder. Nine are listed above. The contract is not one of them.
- **GasFree**: Tether's program that lets Tron USDT fees be paid in USDT. Gasless volume doubled to 3 bn USD in 2026 from 1.5 bn USD in January.
- **PSP**: a payment-service provider that settles a merchant. Stripe's 1.5% stablecoin fee is the named cut.
- **USDT0**: Tether's LayerZero OFT wrapper. More than 70 bn USD of cross-chain volume in under 12 months to 10 February 2026, with a lockbox on Ethereum.

## Go deeper

- [How each kind of stablecoin holds its peg](/en/blog/stablecoins/types-and-pegs/): the mechanism families this chapter then places on a chain.
- [Where RWA lives and where it trades](/en/blog/rwa/chains/): the same split between value parked and value moved, on a different asset class.
- [What one USDC actually equals](/en/blog/stablecoins/what-one-usdc-means/): the three-layer construction that this chapter then places on a chain and in a channel.
- The payments chapter (next) takes Tron's P2P book as the input to the 390 bn versus 33 tn funnel.
- 🟢 DefiLlama stablecoin chain dashboard, read 4 September 2026: Ethereum 147.15 bn USD, Tron 93.70 bn USD, USDT 50.3% on Tron.
- 🟢 Circle Internet Group, Form 424B4 / 10-K family, and quarterly releases cited in the Polish edition for the Coinbase distribution cash.
- 🟢 Tether.io, 10 February 2026: USDT0 volume above 70 bn USD in under 12 months.

## Sources

- 🟢 Author's knowledge base, module 8 (chain table 4 September 2026, USDT 50.3/40.0 split, Ethereum 48–52% versus Dune/Visa ~65% of non-USD supply, Tron fee model, GasFree, 93% P2P, 3.5 million DAU, protocol fees, stablecoin-first L1 cohort, Ethereum DeFi TVL 49.7 versus Solana 5.91, Tron 60–80% of payment volume) and module 10 (nine channels, Coinbase >25% of USDC, Stripe 1.5%, merchant 2–7%, Coinbase custody 300 bn USD / 80% of US crypto ETF AUM, DBS for USDG).
- 🟢 Polish research edition, `content/blog/stablecoins/zastosowania.md` (chain shares, Tron 97.9% USDT, 7.9 tn USD of 2025 USDT transfers, 93% P2P, 27 validators), `content/blog/stablecoins/technologie.md` (Plasma, Codex, Tempo, Arc; USDT0; Plasma TVL 599 mn versus 18.7 bn unreconciled), `content/blog/stablecoins/wojny.md` (USDT 50.3% on Tron), `content/blog/stablecoins/gracze.md` and `content/blog/stablecoins/biznes.md` (Circle paid Coinbase 908 mn USD in 2024; Bridge ~400 bn USD volume).
- 🟢 DefiLlama API, 4 September 2026: 312.0 bn USD all pegs; chain table as in the brief; Hyperliquid L1 6.99 bn USD; tokenized-Treasury supplies used in the 2026 change figure.
- 🟢 `content/blog/en/research/state-2026-09.md` §(g): live chain table 10 September 2026, Ethereum 147.80 bn USD / 48.32%, Tron 94.22 bn USD / 30.80%, not mixed into the 4 September prose.
- 🟢 `content/blog/en/research/companies.md`: Bridge OCC conditional charter dates (February 2025 in one source, 17 February 2026 in The Block); Stripe acquired Bridge, closed February 2025, reported 1.1 bn USD.
- 🟡 CoinDesk Research, 21 July 2026: 93% of Tron stablecoin transfer volume is P2P.
- 🟡 Messari / RWA.io / Stablecoin Insider, 7 January 2026: 7.9 tn USD of Tron USDT transfers in 2025.
- 🟡 Tether.io, 10 February 2026: USDT0 volume.
- 🟡 Stripe annual letter, February 2026, via the Polish edition: Bridge volume about 400 bn USD, 60% B2B.
- 🟡 IQ.wiki, January 2026: Codex USDC 52.33 mn USD on 27 January 2026.
- 🟡 The Block, July–August 2026, and Eco.com, June 2026: Plasma launch TVL and the later 599 mn USD reading; the 18.7 bn USD Q2 reading is recorded as unreconciled.
- 🔴 KuCoin, August 2026: Arc testnet transaction count, used only as context for the private-network period.

## Caveats

Chain-level shares on 4 September 2026 divide by a chain-level total a few billion below the 312.0 bn USD all-pegs headline. The 48.31% is Ethereum's share of that chain table, not of 312.0 bn USD.

The ~65% Ethereum figure is Dune/Visa on non-USD stablecoin supply. It is not a competitor to 48.31%, and no attempt is made to force them onto one base.

Tron's 97.9% USDT share (Polish DefiLlama read) and the monoculture file's 98% are rounding, not two methodologies. Hyperliquid's 97.9% and 98% are treated the same way.

Plasma's TVL is left as a range across dated readings (2.0–2.04 bn USD at launch, 599 mn USD in April 2026, 18.7 bn USD in Q2 2026 from the same publisher). No single TVL is adopted.

Stable (Bitfinex) has no supply figure in these sources.

The 1–3 USD casual Tron fee and the Polish edition's one-cent staked fee describe two user types. They are not averaged.

Bridge's OCC conditional charter is dated February 2025 in one source in `companies.md` and 17 February 2026 in The Block; the brief uses February 2026. All three pointers stay.

Coinbase's "about 19 bn USD average" of USDC in its own products is a knowledge-base item via the brief. Circle's 908 mn USD payment to Coinbase is the 2024 cash figure in the Polish edition. They measure different things (stock of tokens versus a year's distribution cash).

GasFree's 3 bn USD in 2026 versus 1.5 bn USD in January, Tron's 3.5 million DAU, the 82.2 / 89 mn USD protocol-fee pair, Ethereum's 49.7 bn USD DeFi TVL and Tron's 60–80% payment-volume range are knowledge-base items via the brief and were not re-read from a primary dashboard for this chapter.

The nine-channel list is the knowledge base's inventory. Wallet, DeFi and bridge cash cuts were not established in the material used here, and no fee is invented for them.