I found this recent analysis on stablecoins quite interesting. You know when everyone keeps talking about volume, volume, volume? Well, exactly. But no one really explains what's happening behind these huge numbers. Who is holding these coins? How concentrated are they? Where do they actually circulate?

Dune in partnership with Steakhouse Financial released a very comprehensive dataset on this. And the numbers are somewhat revealing.

First, the obvious: USDT and USDC really dominate everything. Until January of this year, the 15 largest stablecoins reached 304 billion in supply. Tether with its 197 billion and Circle with 73 billion control 89% of the market. But what's interesting is that 2025 was the year of the challengers. Sky's USDS rose 376%, PayPal's PYUSD increased 753%, Ripple's RLUSD skyrocketed 1,803%. Not all grew — USDe had a more modest 23% increase — but diversification is happening.

Now, who is holding these assets? That’s where it varies quite a bit. On EVM and Solana networks, CEXs are the largest category of holders with 80 billion. Whales hold 39 billion. Yield protocols nearly doubled, reaching 9.3 billion. This reflects how yield farming strategies exploded on-chain. What caught my attention is that 77% of the supply is in identified addresses. For on-chain data, that’s an extremely high identification rate. It means we can track where the assets are really going.

But here’s the twist: 172 million unique addresses hold at least one of these stablecoins. Seems huge, right? But the concentration varies a lot. USDT has 136 million holders, and its top 10 wallets control only 23-26%. USDC has 36 million holders with a similar distribution. But other tokens? USDS has 90% concentrated in 10 wallets. USDF has 99%. USD0 is extreme with 99% in 10 wallets. That doesn’t necessarily mean a problem — many are new, created by institutions — but it completely changes how you should interpret these supply data.

The volume in January was staggering: $10.3 trillion in transactions. More than double January 2025. Base led with $5.9 trillion in volume despite only having 4.4 billion in supply. Ethereum with $2.4 trillion, Tron with $682 billion. USDC dominated with $8.3 trillion in transactions — almost five times USDT — even though its supply is 2.7 times smaller. This shows that USDC’s speed and frequency are much higher.

Now, what do these stablecoins actually do? Here’s where it gets interesting. Of the $10.3 trillion in January, 90% went through activity categories that can be identified. Liquidity on DEXs and market-making operations: $5.9 trillion. Flash loans: $1.3 trillion. Flow through CEXs: $599 billion. Issuance and burning operations: $106 billion — nearly five times more than the same period last year. Yield protocols: $2.7 billion. Basically, stablecoins function as trading infrastructure, not so much as a means of payment.

The circulation velocity is an indicator that many underestimate. USDC on Base has an average daily velocity of 14 times — the entire supply circulates 14 times a day. On Solana and Polygon, about once. USDT is faster on BNB (1.4 times) and extremely stable on Tron (0.3 times), which makes sense for cross-border payments. But on Ethereum, USDT circulates only 0.2 times — $100 billion in supply is practically idle.

USDe and USDS intentionally have slow velocity. USDe on Ethereum: 0.09 times. USDS: 0.5 times. Both were designed as yield-bearing stablecoins. You stake to capture yield, not to circulate. So low velocity is a feature, not a bug.

What I found most revealing is that the same coin behaves differently on each chain. PYUSD on Solana has a velocity of 0.6 times, four times faster than on Ethereum (0.1 times). The ecosystem matters more than the token.

And there’s something that’s not getting enough attention: stablecoins of local currencies. Euro has 17 tokens with 990 million in supply. Brazilian real: 141 million. Yen: 13 million. There are Nigerian naira, Kenyan shilling, South African rand, Turkish lira, Indonesian rupiah. There are already 59 tokens distributed across six continents. Conversion like 230 euros to naira shows the relevance of this growing market. The total supply in non-dollar currencies is only 1.2 billion, but the infrastructure is being built. The data are there to track how this evolves.

Overall, what these data show is that the stablecoin market is much more sophisticated than it appears on the surface. It’s not just “circulating volume.” It’s about who holds, how it circulates, where the flow goes, what the velocity is, and how concentrated it is. Institutions and regulators need to understand these layers to make real decisions.