Stablecoins remain one of the top use cases in crypto, with the market showing tremendous growth year over year. USDC market share climbs to 25% taking 4% from USDT. The velocity measure for USDT of Tron and USDC is almost equal, while USDT on Ethereum moves two times slower.
Artemis and Dune Analytics released a detailed report on the state of the stablecoin market from February 2024 to February 2025. We have summarized the key points from the report and added our own observations.
Stablecoins have been a primary use case for crypto and continue gaining popularity, attracting new users both inside and outside the crypto space. As of last month, the total stablecoin supply reached $214 billion, with $35 trillion in transfer volume over the past year.
In the last 12 months, the stablecoin supply increased by 63%, while the monthly transfer volume more than doubled. The number of stablecoin users has also grown significantly, with active addresses increasing from 19.6 million in February 2024 to 30 million in February 2025.
The majority of stablecoins (around 91%) remain centralized and fiat-backed (usually by cash reserves and treasuries), while the rest are mostly over-collateralized decentralized stablecoins. Stablecoins with strong collateral frameworks are favored, while the over-collateralized and algorithmic models struggle to gain market share.
The market continues to be dominated by two centralized stablecoins, Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. Over the last year, USDT grew from $96 billion to $146 billion but lost market share from 69% to 64%. USDC doubled from $28.5 billion to $56 billion, gaining 4% and now holding around 25% of the market.
There were a few factors behind the growth of USDC's market share. Firstly, the company’s efforts toward compliance with regulations. Circle became the first stablecoin provider licensed under the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework. Additionally, the project secured licenses in Canada and Dubai. Alongside its compliance efforts, the project gained significant traction on Solana, which added a $6 billion supply last year. This primarily happened due to growing memecoin activity on the chain.
Another notable player that has entered the stablecoin space is Ethena. Its market cap skyrocketed from $620 million to $6.2 billion in February 2025, now ranking as the third-largest stablecoin by supply.
We have covered Ethena in several articles throughout the year.
Notably, the once-largest decentralized stablecoin, DAI (now rebranded as Sky), has been losing its market share, with its market cap slightly declining from $4.9 billion to $4.7 billion.
When it comes to transfer volumes, USDC is leading the market with a market share of around 66%. In absolute terms, USDC’s monthly transfer volume surged from $1.1 trillion in February 2024 to $2.7 trillion in February 2025. USDT also doubled its transfer volume in 2024, rising from monthly $600 billion to $1.2 trillion in the same period.
However, if we look deeper, USDT continues to be the number one stablecoin for P2P transactions, while USDC is mainly preferred by institutions due to its compliance with regulations. USDC also kept the top position by trading volumes in DeFi.
The Cambridge Digital Money Dashboard (CDMD) suggests an interesting measure of the stablecoin adoption. Like with fiat currency, it is called velocity, and shows how fast an average unit of a monetary form is exchanged within an economy. In traditional economics it is a ratio of Gross National Product (GNP) to the Monetary Supply M2.
The stablecoin velocity measure suggested by CDMD is a ratio of its transaction volume to the market cap. The graph shows a slow but consistent growth.
Annual averages reported by CDMD are as follows:
In simple terms, each circulating token facilitates around $77-80 in annual transactions (USDT on Ethereum excluded). For perspective, similar measures for the Visa and Mastercard are $725 and $1,025 accordingly (2023 financial statements).
When it comes to liquidity across chains, the main stablecoin liquidity remains in the Ethereum network; in fact, it even grew by 1% to 55% YoY.
Second is Tron, which has a 28% market share. However, because USDC abandoned Tron in 2024, all of this market share is in USDT, making it the second largest chain for it with 45% of the total circulating USDT tokens.
Conversely to Ethereum, Tron’s market share has declined by 7% over the last year, mainly due to the growth of USDT share on Ethereum and new emerging networks for USDC: Solana and Base L2. Solana was the biggest beneficiary, growing from 1.6% to 5.4%, while Base also expanded significantly from 0.2% to 1.8%.
A key driver of Solana and Base’s growth was the rise in memecoin trading on these chains. When it comes to transfer volumes, there have been major shifts across blockchains, with Base, Ethereum, Tron, and Solana leading the way. Throughout the year, there were months where Solana or Base accounted for 40-60% of stablecoin transfer volume. However, this was primarily due to speculative activities in the memecoin space.
When it comes to P2P transfers, Tron continues to dominate the space with over 50% market share, followed by Ethereum.
The majority of stablecoin supply continues to be concentrated in centralized exchanges, which hold vast liquidity reserves and act as primary custody solutions for both individual and institutional users.
However, it is interesting that stablecoin transfer volumes are mainly generated by DeFi applications. Decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and staking services collectively drive the highest share of stablecoin movement, which might indicate a growing activity in DeFi.
While stablecoin transfer volumes have already surpassed major payment networks like Visa there is still a lot of room to grow. The current stablecoin supply is roughly 100 times smaller than the U.S. M1 money supply, so the growth of stablecoins and their adoption are likely to continue expanding further for years to come.