Dune Analytics has broken down the $315 billion stablecoin market at transaction level. The analysis finds Tether and USDT dominate payments, while Circle and USDC dominate trading, with 20x daily turnover on Base alone.
Market capitalization and total volume have long been the standard metrics for ranking stablecoins, with USDT (issued by Tether) and USDC (issued by Circle) at the top and everything else trailing behind as a long tail. But the two headline numbers obscure the actual division of labor in the market, according to Dune Analytics. In the company's third newsletter on digital assets, it emerges that USDT and USDC, together 83 percent of the market, in practice solve two entirely different jobs.
Dune Analytics was founded in 2018 by the two Norwegian entrepreneurs Fredrik Haga and Mats Julian Olsen.
The picture is unambiguous when Dune separates ordinary commerce from card spending and AI-agent payments in crypto. In the first half of 2026, around $95 billion was settled in USDT payments, against just $14 billion in USDC. The largest category is business-to-business payments, worth around $48 billion, of which 92 percent runs through USDT. Payroll follows the same pattern, with a USDT share of around 96 percent.
Behind the figures lies a widely distributed ownership base. USDT on Tron has around 74.7 million holders, and the ten largest addresses hold just around 5 percent of supply. Around 93 percent of holdings sit in ordinary wallets rather than smart contracts — shaped like a spending balance for transfers, not a trading position. USDT on BNB Chain follows the same pattern, with around 70 million holders and 18 percent concentrated in the top ten addresses.
USDC shows the opposite pattern: more concentrated ownership, where the ten largest addresses hold around a quarter of supply on each main chain, and far higher turnover. On Base, the chain Coinbase itself built, around $2.6 trillion in USDC was traded in June alone, and the token turns over there roughly 20 times a day. By comparison, USDC on Solana sits at 1.8 daily turnovers and on Ethereum at 1.1 — still far ahead of USDT, which doesn't reach even one turnover a day on either Tron or BNB Chain.
Most of this activity is pure trading capital. According to Dune, 96 percent of USDC flow on Base is tied to flash loans and liquidity for decentralized exchanges, not ordinary transfers. On Ethereum the picture is broader, with 57 percent in ordinary wallets and 28 percent held by exchanges, while a full 88 percent of USDC on HyperEVM sits in a single reserve wallet supplying the trading platform Hyperliquid. That balance was close to zero a year ago, but grew to $5.4 billion by June after Hyperliquid made USDC its native stablecoin through a partnership with issuer Circle — an example of how quickly trading capital can concentrate on a single chain.
Alongside the payment dollar and the trading dollar, Dune points to a third, smaller group: USDe and USDS, both under $5 billion in market value, where the bulk of supply — 63 and 89 percent respectively — sits locked in their own yield contracts. These tokens are nearly absent from the payments statistics and have low turnover, a clear sign they're held to earn interest, not to be spent.
The same token can, in fact, play different roles depending on which blockchain it sits on. USDT is a payment instrument on Tron but functions more as exchange settlement on Ethereum. It is therefore the combination of token and chain, not the ticker alone, that according to Dune determines whether you're looking at a payment dollar or a trading dollar.
Sources: Dune Analytics
Get unlimited access to news articles and a Nordic community via Kaupr Member (free membership)
You have read what you can read for free. With an account you get unlimited access to all news and articles on kaupr.io — and become part of the network of investors, professionals and builders following onchain finance.
