Two stablecoins carry 96% of all stablecoin volume

We counted the whole category rather than the headline names. One hundred stablecoins hold $305.59bn between them and traded $64.07bn in the last 24 hours. That is $2.67bn an hour, every hour, with no opening bell.

Who is bigger and who is smaller

Two of them do almost all of the moving. Tether's USDT holds $183.01bn, which is 59.9% of the money, and accounts for $45.48bn of the day's volume, which is 71.0% of the movement. Circle's USDC holds $72.08bn, 23.6% of supply, and moves $16.20bn, 25.3%. Together they are 83.5% of the float and 96.3% of the turnover.

Everything from third place down holds 16.5% of the supply and moves 3.7% of the volume. USDS sits on $10.02bn and traded $60m. Ethena's USDE holds $4.68bn and traded $40m. USDF, USDD and BFUSD round to zero at this scale. The long tail of 85 smaller coins holds $10.23bn between them, 3.3% of the category.

Turnover, not supply

Turnover is the number that separates a currency from a parked balance. USDT changed hands 0.25 times its own supply in a day, so the whole float turns over in four days. USDC runs at 0.22, which is the same rhythm. A coin running at 0.01 needs a hundred days to turn over once, and several of the larger non-USDT names are exactly there.

Two meters, one market

A second meter reads lower, and the gap matters. Coinbase and The Block Pro put organic transfers above $400m an hour in the third quarter, $891bn for the quarter, after screening out the flows that are not payments. Our $2.67bn counts exchange trading. The ratio is 6.7 to one, which says most stablecoin movement is still trading, and the payments layer is the smaller number inside the bigger one.

“73% of screened stablecoin transfers happened outside US banking hours.”

— The Always-On Dollar, Coinbase and The Block Pro Research, October 2026

Their other figures are worth keeping. Stablecoins sit in 293 million blockchain addresses, which against today's float averages $1,043 an address. The $891bn of quarterly transfers equals 2.9 turns of the entire current supply. And 73% of transfers landed outside US banking hours, which is the part no bank rail can copy.

The concentration cuts both ways. A category where two issuers carry 96% of the movement is efficient and fragile in the same breath, and the month already showed what one holder can do: USD1 lost $400m in two weeks when a single address redeemed. On the other side of the ledger, these balances now move national numbers in countries with weak currencies.

The thing to watch is whether a third name ever develops velocity. Supply is easy to buy and easy to announce. Turnover has to be earned by people choosing to send the thing, and on today's reading nobody outside the top two has.

Informational material, not investment advice. Supply and volume were read on 20 October 2026, exchange volume and on-chain transfer volume are different measurements, and a one-day snapshot moves.