USD1 stablecoin lost $400m in two weeks, and one address did half

USD1, the dollar token issued by World Liberty Financial, shrank from $4.43bn to $4.02bn between 6 and 19 October. That is $409m and 9.1% of the supply, and it happened without the price leaving its band. Holders redeemed; nobody sold into a broken peg.

Where the money went

The money left two chains and not the third. On Ethereum $184.60m went out across 63 separate burns between 6 and 15 October. On BNB Chain $200.43m went out across twelve. Solana did not move at all and still holds $1.42bn.

Those two counts describe different behaviour. Sixty-three burns for $184.60m average $2.93m apiece, which reads like many hands. Twelve burns for $200.43m average $16.70m, nearly six times larger, which reads like one. Onchain Benchmark traced close to $200m of the BNB Chain side to a single unidentified address moving in batches of $30m to $50m.

“We could not establish who controlled the funds or why they were redeemed.”

— Onchain Benchmark, Blockchain research firm

What we checked ourselves

We read the contracts rather than take the totals on faith. USD1 on Ethereum stands at 1,393,854,840 tokens this morning and 1,191,915,919 on BNB Chain. Add Solana's $1.42bn and the three chains account for essentially the whole $4.02bn, so the supply was redeemed rather than bridged somewhere quieter. The split now runs 34.7% on Ethereum, 29.7% on BNB Chain and 35.4% on Solana, so the chain nobody redeemed from now carries the largest share of the token.

The peg held throughout. USD1 traded between $0.998 and $1.000 across the fortnight, a deviation of two tenths of a percent, and sat at $0.9991 this morning. It remains the thirtieth largest crypto asset by market value, which is the part of the story that argues against reading this as a run.

How fast it drained

The rate is what stands out. USD1's Ethereum supply fell 11.45% over the period. Ethena's USDe fell 4.93%, USDC 2.18% and USDT 0.76%. USD1 drained fifteen times faster than Tether did over the same fortnight, and a token whose circulation is this concentrated moves on decisions rather than on flows.

More than 99% of the Ethereum redemptions passed through BitGo, which issues and custodies USD1 and which is being sued for $141m by DWF Labs in a separate matter. The one thing that settles this is whether the BNB Chain address comes back, because a stablecoin this size now moves national balances when a single holder changes its mind.

Informational material, not investment advice. Contract balances were read on the morning of 19 October 2026, and a single large holder can reverse a move of this size in a day.