Where stablecoins stand in September 2026

Six years of growth, then a plateau

A stablecoin is a token on a blockchain that aims to stay worth one unit of a currency, almost always one US dollar, because someone stands ready to swap it for that dollar. The first chapter takes that promise apart. Here the question is simpler: how many of these tokens exist.

Supply is the number of tokens in circulation. For a dollar stablecoin, supply in tokens and value in dollars are the same number, so analysts use "supply" and "market cap" interchangeably. The standard public count comes from DefiLlama, a free dashboard that adds up every tracked token on every chain.

The long run is a steep climb. Dollar stablecoin supply was about 4 bn USD in January 2020 and about 150 bn USD by December 2021, according to DefiLlama. Growth paused after the collapse of the algorithmic token TerraUSD in May 2022 and the Silicon Valley Bank scare around USDC in March 2023, both covered in the history chapter, and then resumed.

The record came on 17 May 2026, when DefiLlama's daily chart showed just under 321 bn USD. By 4 September 2026 the figure was about 311 bn USD, roughly 3% lower. That is small in percentage terms. What makes it notable is that it happened without a crash: no issuer failed, no large token broke its peg.

The plateau has a clear shape once you look token by token. The two leaders, USDT and USDC, barely moved in 2026: each was within about 2% of where it started the year. The tokens that shrank were the ones people held for a payout. USDe, whose holders earn a return from a derivatives trade, fell by about a third, and PayPal's PYUSD, which carries a loyalty reward, fell by about a sixth.

A popular explanation says the money rotated into tokenized Treasury funds, which grew fast in 2026. The sizes do not support it. Stablecoin supply fell by roughly 10 bn USD from the May peak, while the whole tokenized Treasury category grew by less than 1 bn USD between May and August, according to rwa.xyz. Some money may have made that move, but it cannot be the main story.

Who issues the dollars

The issuer is the company or protocol that creates the token and owes the holder the promised redemption. A handful of issuers account for almost all supply, and the ranking has been stable for years at the top and restless below it.

Source: DefiLlama, read 4 September 2026. Shares divide by 311.2 bn USD of USD-pegged supply. "Everything else" includes Sky's older DAI token and tokenized Treasury funds that DefiLlama lists alongside stablecoins.

Three things stand out. First, Tether and Circle together hold about 83% of the market. Second, most of the names below them are less than three years old: USDG launched in November 2024, RLUSD in December 2024 and USD1 in March 2025. Third, two of them, USDG and PYUSD, come from the same issuer. Paxos rents out its licence and reserve management to companies that want their own branded dollar.

Market concentration is how much of a market the largest players hold. Economists measure it with the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI): square each firm's percentage share and add the results, so a monopoly scores 10,000. US competition authorities treat a score above 1,800 as highly concentrated. On the 4 September reading the dollar stablecoin market scored about 4,059, more than twice that line.

Where the tokens live

A stablecoin is issued on one or more blockchains, the shared ledgers that record who holds which tokens. The same issuer can mint USDC natively on Ethereum, Solana, Base and many others, and each chain's balance is counted separately. The chains chapter explains how tokens move between them. The snapshot is below.

Ethereum held about 48% of all stablecoins on 4 September 2026 and Tron about 31%, according to DefiLlama. Those two numbers hide two different businesses. Ethereum is where stablecoins serve as collateral in lending protocols, as reserves for institutions and as the base for tokenized funds. Tron is where people send USDT to each other: CoinDesk Research found in July 2026 that 93% of stablecoin transfer volume on Tron was person to person, the highest share of any chain it tracked.

Tron is also almost entirely one token. About 98% of its stablecoin supply is USDT, and it holds more USDT than Ethereum does: about 50% of all USDT against about 40% on Ethereum. Hyperliquid, a blockchain built for trading perpetual futures, is the mirror image: about 7 bn USD of stablecoins, nearly all USDC, used as margin for trading.

What holds each peg

The peg is the target price, usually 1.00 USD, and the mechanism that defends it is the most useful way to sort stablecoins. The chapter on pegs walks through five designs in depth. DefiLlama uses a simpler three-bucket split, and even that shows how lopsided the market is.

Source: DefiLlama, read 4 September 2026.

Fiat-backed stablecoins hold cash, Treasury bills and similar safe assets at a company, and let verified clients swap tokens for dollars. They are about 91% of supply. Crypto-backed stablecoins are created against deposits of other crypto assets, usually worth more than the stablecoins issued. Algorithmic stablecoins have no outside reserve and rely on a second token to absorb losses; after TerraUSD fell from about 18 bn USD to almost nothing in May 2022, the category never recovered.

The crypto-backed bucket mixes very different machines. USDS from Sky backs its dollars with a blend of crypto loans and tokenized real-world assets. USDe from Ethena holds crypto and shorts the same amount in futures markets, a delta-neutral hedge whose value stays flat as long as the hedge holds. Both land in one DefiLlama bucket, but they fail in different ways, which is why this course treats them separately.

The headline total also carries a few things that are not stablecoins in the strict sense. DefiLlama lists tokenized money-market and Treasury funds such as BlackRock's BUIDL, Circle's USYC and Ondo's USDY, whose share price rises as interest accrues instead of staying at 1.00 USD. On 4 September 2026 the tokens trading outside a 0.98 to 1.02 USD band were worth about 6.7 bn USD, a group that also includes euro tokens priced in dollars. That does not change the picture at the top, but it explains part of the gap between aggregators. The funds themselves belong to the RWA series, starting with what a tokenized real-world asset is.

Beyond the dollar

Stablecoins in other currencies exist, and they are tiny. On 4 September 2026 about 99.7% of all stablecoin supply was pegged to the US dollar, according to DefiLlama. When I read DefiLlama's list again on 24 September 2026, all non-dollar stablecoins together came to about 1 bn USD.

The euro is almost all of that remainder. Circle's EURC was the largest euro token, at about 0.5 bn USD, followed by EURCV from Société Générale-FORGE, the only large European bank that issues its own public stablecoin. Swiss franc, pound and Singapore dollar tokens each measured in tens of millions. Japan's first regulated yen stablecoin, JPYC, launched on 27 October 2025 but remains very small on public dashboards.

The reason is not a lack of rules. The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA) has licensed more than twenty issuers of e-money tokens, its name for a stablecoin backed one to one by a single currency, many of them in euros. What the euro tokens lack is demand: people outside the eurozone who want to hold euros on a blockchain are few, while demand for digital dollars comes from traders, exporters and savers all over the world. The regulation chapter covers how MiCA and the US GENIUS Act shape who can issue.

How to read these numbers

Supply is the number everyone quotes, and it answers only one question: how many dollar tokens exist. Two other measures matter as much, and they tell different stories.

Usage is how much value moves between people and businesses. Gross on-chain transfer volume for stablecoins was about 33 to 35 tn USD in 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements and Visa with Artemis. Most of that is exchanges, trading bots and wallets moving money to themselves. McKinsey and Artemis estimated that payments for goods, services and wages came to about 390 bn USD in 2025. The payments chapter shows how the first number shrinks into the second.

Velocity is how many times a typical token changes hands in a period: transfer volume divided by supply. It separates a token that sits in a vault from one that works. Rough arithmetic on the numbers above is enough to see the spread.

Author's arithmetic on BIS, Visa/Artemis, McKinsey/Artemis and Messari 2025 figures, with supply taken at roughly 300 bn USD overall and under 100 bn USD of USDT on Tron. Orders of magnitude only.

The three measures answer three questions. Supply tells you how much trust in issuers exists, since every token is a claim someone chose to hold. Usage tells you how much economic activity the tokens carry. Velocity tells you whether a token is money in motion or money parked. A token can lead on one and lag on the others: tokenized Treasury funds grew fast in 2026 but barely move, while USDT on Tron is modest next to the whole market and moves constantly.

What to watch next

• A new supply record above the May 2026 peak: it would show the plateau was a pause. A further slide, with no crash, would show that part of 2025's growth was paid-for demand that has now left.
• The share of the top two tokens: if USDT and USDC fall clearly below 80% combined, the newer issuers (USDG, USD1, RLUSD) are winning real distribution. If it creeps back toward 90%, scale is winning.
• US interest rates: issuer revenue and the payouts on yield-bearing tokens both follow short-term rates, so each cut changes which tokens people keep.
• Tron's share of USDT: it measures whether person-to-person dollars keep favouring the cheapest reliable chain, or move to newer payment-focused chains.
• Euro stablecoin supply above a few billion USD: that would be the first sign that MiCA's licences are turning into demand.