Stablecoin weekly: the $1.26B drain returns as USDC leads the slide

USDT, USDC, and DAI fell to a combined $260.934B, down $1.257B from the prior-week comparison. The move reverses last week's near-flat +$8.5M print and is led by USDC, not USDT. 1

Data cutoff: approximately 8:05 a.m. on July 29, 2026, UTC-05:00. DeFiLlama's current and previous-week circulating-supply fields are comparable balance snapshots. They are not issuer transaction totals and do not identify whether a token was redeemed, bridged, deposited, or moved between wallets. 1

Circle's own page showed $72.3B of USDC in circulation as of July 27, which is close to DeFiLlama's $72.285B snapshot despite the different observation dates. 2

USDC lost $1.018B over seven days. Ethereum accounted for -$482.6M, Solana for -$384.9M, and Polygon for -$102.8M. Together, those three chains explain nearly the entire weekly decline. The positive offsets were smaller: Stellar added $89.3M, Hyperliquid L1 added $27.7M, and Base added $20.5M. 1

The chain mix matters more than the single headline number. Ethereum still holds about 64% of current USDC supply, while Solana holds about 9% and Hyperliquid L1 about 8.5%. The two largest negative changes came from the first two of those venues. This is a reduction in recorded balances, not proof that capital left crypto altogether, but it is a weaker setup for a broad risk-on interpretation.

USDT's weekly decline was much smaller at $190.2M, but the internal move was large. Ethereum USDT fell $758.6M, while Solana rose $449.4M and Tron rose $177.5M. Aptos added $79.9M and Mantle added $36.8M. The basket ended lower because the Ethereum loss outweighed the gains on Solana and Tron. 1

Tron and Ethereum still hold roughly 49% and 41% of USDT supply respectively. Solana's increase is therefore meaningful as a venue shift, but it is not large enough to change the aggregate direction. The endpoint balances also cannot show whether the Solana gain came through a bridge, a treasury operation, an exchange transfer, or ordinary wallet activity.

DAI fell $49.7M to $4.800B. Ethereum accounted for -$43.4M, Polygon for -$5.6M, and Avalanche for -$0.6M. The only visible positive move of note was a roughly $0.1M increase on PulseChain. Ethereum still holds about 86% of the DAI balance, so the weekly result is mostly an Ethereum contraction rather than a cross-chain rotation. 1

Whale Alert recorded two 250M USDC mints at the USDC Treasury on Solana, one on July 27 at 5:04 p.m. local time and another on July 28 at 5:40 p.m. 3 4

Those two alerts total roughly $500M, yet Solana's observed USDC balance was $384.9M lower than a week earlier and total USDC was down $1.018B. The combination suggests that treasury issuance was absorbed by other balance changes during the comparison period. It does not establish a net increase in exchange liquidity or spot-market demand.

The USDT alerts were transfers, not mint or burn records. Whale Alert logged 500M USDT from Tether Treasury to Binance on Tron on July 23 at 10:36 a.m., followed by 120M USDT from Tether Treasury to Bitfinex on Ethereum on July 29 at 2:20 a.m. 5 6 A separate 130M USDT transfer from Tether Treasury to an unknown wallet on Tron was posted at 5:09 a.m. on July 29. 7

These transfers may represent inventory deployment, settlement, or rebalancing. The alerts do not show that the tokens were sold, held as exchange buying power, or counted as fresh supply. They should therefore remain separate from the DeFiLlama weekly delta.

The spot snapshot around the data cutoff showed BTC at $64,181, down 2.65% over seven days, and ETH at $1,901.81, down 1.88%. 8 9

The latest Fear and Greed reading returned 29, classified as Fear. 10 Prices, sentiment, and the Big-3 supply delta are pointing in the same direction: this is not a clean liquidity expansion. The USDT rotation toward Solana and the USDC mints are useful watchpoints, but they have not yet produced a higher aggregate balance or a stronger market tape.

The week's $1.257B Big-3 contraction is a material change from the prior near-flat report. USDC accounts for four-fifths of the loss, with Ethereum and Solana providing the main pressure. USDT is closer to flat only because Solana and Tron gains offset much of Ethereum's decline. DAI adds another small Ethereum-led drain.

For the next print, watch whether Solana USDT holds its gain without another Ethereum drawdown, whether Solana and Ethereum USDC stabilize, and whether the two recent USDC Treasury mints translate into higher endpoint balances. Until those conditions improve alongside BTC and ETH's weekly performance, treat the current data as venue rotation inside a shrinking stablecoin base, not as confirmed new buying power.

This report verifies Big-3 circulating supply, current and previous-week balances across the major chains returned by DeFiLlama, Circle's dated USDC figure, five Whale Alert event records, BTC and ETH spot data, and Fear and Greed. A comparable seven-day series for stablecoin bridge-pair flows, combined exchange-held USDT plus USDC balances, funding rates, and categorized wallet-level mint or burn events was not available in the sources used for this run. Chain balance changes are therefore not presented as bridge flows, and issuer transfers are not treated as net new demand.

Whale Alert is an alert feed rather than a complete issuer accounting ledger. Its mint and transfer notices provide event-level evidence, but they do not by themselves establish redemption totals, exchange absorption, or the final use of the tokens. '} … .., total 7667 chars truncatedAha tool used wrong command? str_replace tool schema has command create, path etc not command? I passed command as create, yes output weird