Stablecoin weekly: Big-3 falls $991.4M as USDC sheds $1.37B
The Big-3 stablecoin base fell $991.4M to $263.035B as USDC shed $1,369.3M across Solana, Ethereum and Hyperliquid L1, while $589.8M of USDT moved onto Solana and exchange balances rose.
The aggregate circulating supply of the three largest stablecoins fell $991.4M over the seven days ending September 30, 2026 at 08:00 (UTC−05:00), to $263.035B, a 0.38% contraction and the first weekly decline in two weeks 1. USDC carried $1,369.3M of the fall, USDT added $400.3M and DAI lost $22.4M 1.
DeFiLlama restated its September 23 chain-level baseline upward after last week's issue was published. The week-over-week figures below are measured from the revised base. The Solana USDC balance is the clearest case, and the chain section sets out both readings.
The supply moved further than it shrank. USDC lost $611.7M on Solana, $436.5M on Ethereum and $333.8M on Hyperliquid L1, while Arbitrum added $164.3M. USDT moved the other way on two of the same chains, gaining $589.8M on Solana and losing $282.8M on Ethereum, with Tron up $120.6M 1.
Bitcoin traded at $85,130.96 and Ethereum at $2,729.22 on the same morning, down 0.83% and up 0.52% over the seven days 23, and the sentiment index held at 71, Greed, where it stood a week earlier 4. Stablecoin balances sitting in exchange wallets rose across the same seven days.
Big-3 aggregate supply movements
| Asset | Current supply | Previous-week supply | 7-day change | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USDT | $183.764B | $183.364B | +$400.3M | +0.22% |
| USDC | $74.485B | $75.854B | −$1,369.3M | −1.81% |
| DAI | $4.786B | $4.808B | −$22.4M | −0.47% |
| Total Big-3 | $263.035B | $264.027B | −$991.4M | −0.38% |
DeFiLlama's asset-level response supplies the current and previous-week values for all three assets 1.
Over 30 days the Big-3 is still $773.0M larger, with USDT up $344.1M, USDC up $436.2M and DAI down $7.3M 1. The final day extended the week's move: the source's daily readings put the Big-3 $363.9M below the day before, $357.5M of that USDC 1.
The restatement is large enough to change how USDC's week reads. DeFiLlama now puts Solana's USDC balance at $7.958B for September 23, against the $7.290B last week's issue printed for that date — a $668M revision upward 5. Measured from the source's own restated base, Solana's USDC balance fell $611.7M across the week. Measured against the level a reader saw in the previous issue, the same balance is close to flat. Both readings come from DeFiLlama; this report uses the first, and takes every week-over-week figure from a single same-moment pull.
Chain-level supply distribution
A chain balance records where a stablecoin sits at the snapshot moment. Each table below carries the same nine named chains plus one residual row, ordered by the size of the weekly change.
USDT
| Chain | Current supply | Previous-week supply | 7-day change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solana | $2.725B | $2.135B | +$589.8M |
| Ethereum | $73.440B | $73.723B | −$282.8M |
| Tron | $92.490B | $92.369B | +$120.6M |
| Other chains | $3.796B | $3.906B | −$110.7M |
| Polygon | $794.7M | $737.9M | +$56.7M |
| Arbitrum | $881.7M | $834.2M | +$47.5M |
| Hyperliquid L1 | $65.1M | $86.4M | −$21.3M |
| BSC | $9.1807B | $9.1803B | +$0.5M |
| Avalanche | $391.8M | $391.8M | −$12K |
| Base | Not reported by source | Not reported by source | Not reported by source |
Solana's USDT balance gained $530.1M in a single day on September 25 and finished the week at $2.725B, the largest single-chain addition anywhere in this snapshot 6. Tether issues natively on Tron, Ethereum and Solana, so a chain balance records an endpoint only. The residual decline sits mostly in TON, down $100.0M 6.
USDC
| Chain | Current supply | Previous-week supply | 7-day change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solana | $7.346B | $7.958B | −$611.7M |
| Ethereum | $45.936B | $46.372B | −$436.5M |
| Hyperliquid L1 | $7.347B | $7.681B | −$333.8M |
| Other chains | $3.458B | $3.657B | −$199.2M |
| Arbitrum | $2.377B | $2.212B | +$164.3M |
| Base | $4.345B | $4.311B | +$34.0M |
| Avalanche | $451.7M | $437.8M | +$13.9M |
| Polygon | $1.608B | $1.615B | −$7.3M |
| BSC | $1.589B | $1.582B | +$7.1M |
| Tron | $27.9M | $27.9M | +$0 |
The residual bucket is dominated by Arc, the Layer 1 Circle launched on September 16, which fell $163.0M to $463.3M and accounts for most of the $199.2M "Other chains" decline 5. Arc entered the source's chain breakdown on September 17 at $649.2M and has slipped in every window since.
Solana's USDC balance swung by more than $400M on three of the seven days, and Ethereum's reached $46.888B on September 25 before giving the gain back 5. Hyperliquid L1 holds the collateral that backs perpetual futures on that venue, so its $333.8M decline measures margin parked there as much as liquidity.
DAI
| Chain | Current supply | Previous-week supply | 7-day change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polygon | $470.0M | $502.8M | −$32.8M |
| Ethereum | $4.1833B | $4.1741B | +$9.2M |
| Arbitrum | $16.9M | $15.7M | +$1.1M |
| Avalanche | $11.2M | $10.9M | +$0.3M |
| Other chains | $72.9M | $73.2M | −$0.3M |
| Solana | $510,300 | $510,300 | +$0 |
| BSC | $31.1M | $31.1M | +$0 |
| Tron | Not reported by source | Not reported by source | Not reported by source |
| Base | Not reported by source | Not reported by source | Not reported by source |
| Hyperliquid L1 | Not reported by source | Not reported by source | Not reported by source |
DAI's $22.4M weekly move is concentrated on Polygon, against a $9.2M gain on its home chain. Source for all three chain tables: 1.
Bridge-received supply
The same endpoints separate each chain's balance into the part issued natively there and the part that arrived over a bridge. Summing the bridge-received side gives the float sitting behind a wrapped or bridged representation.
| Asset | Bridge-received, Sep 30 | Bridge-received, Sep 23 | 7-day change |
|---|---|---|---|
| USDT | $13.142B | $13.061B | +$80.6M |
| USDC | $3.824B | $4.063B | −$239.1M |
| DAI | $602.9M | $634.3M | −$31.4M |
| Total Big-3 | $17.569B | $17.759B | −$190.0M |
The largest single-chain moves inside that total:
| Asset | Chain | Sep 23 | Sep 30 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USDC | Hyperliquid L1 | $605.7M | $393.9M | −$211.8M |
| USDT | Polygon | $738.8M | $796.2M | +$57.4M |
| USDT | Arbitrum | $834.6M | $881.5M | +$46.9M |
| DAI | Polygon | $502.7M | $470.2M | −$32.5M |
| USDT | Hyperliquid L1 | $86.4M | $65.0M | −$21.4M |
| USDT | Berachain | $44.5M | $25.3M | −$19.2M |
Bridge-carried float shrank 1.07% against 0.38% for total supply, taking the bridged share of the Big-3 to 6.68% from 6.73%. Hyperliquid L1 is the week's clearest case: $211.8M of its $333.8M USDC decline was bridge-carried float, so most of that chain's drop came from wrapped USDC leaving, with the natively issued part down $122.0M. The endpoint records how much of a balance arrived over a bridge and stops at that. No bridge name, source chain or route pair is attached, so these figures describe a stock of bridge-carried float.
Verified issuer and large-wallet events
Whale Alert describes its feed as live reporting on large on-chain transactions as they happen, and this table holds its alerts inside the reporting window once converted to UTC−05:00. The feed reports identified large events, so its totals are a floor on issuance.
| Asset | Amount and action | Chain | Local time | Entity / details |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USDT | 500.0M from Binance to Tether Treasury 8 | Ethereum | Sep 24, 15:12 | Rotation, leg 1 |
| USDT | 500.0M from Tether Treasury to Binance 9 | Solana | Sep 24, 15:27 | Rotation, leg 2 |
| USDT | 160.0M from Bitfinex to Tether Treasury 10 | Tron | Sep 26, 08:03 | Rotation, leg 1 |
| USDT | 160.0M from Tether Treasury to Bitfinex 11 | Ethereum | Sep 26, 08:06 | Rotation, leg 2 |
| USDT | 106.3M from OKX to unknown wallet 12 | Tron | Sep 28, 03:55 | Venue outflow |
| USDT | 150.0M from Tether Treasury to unknown wallet 13 | Tron | Sep 29, 08:02 | Unlabeled recipient |
| USDC | 268.0M from Coinbase Institutional to Coinbase 14 | Ethereum | Sep 28, 15:02 | Custody consolidation |
| USDC | 153.1M from Coinbase Institutional to Coinbase 15 | Ethereum | Sep 29, 13:51 | Custody consolidation |
| USDC | 177.6M from unknown wallet to Coinbase 16 | Ethereum | Sep 29, 13:53 | Venue inflow |
| USDC | 100.0M from Ethena to unknown wallet 17 | Ethereum | Sep 29, 17:35 | Protocol outflow |
| USDC | 210.6M burned at USDC Treasury 18 | Ethereum | Sep 30, 05:53 | Circle Treasury |
| USDC | 107.1M from unknown wallet to USDC Treasury 19 | Solana | Sep 30, 06:49 | Treasury deposit |
| USDC | 250.0M minted at USDC Treasury 20 | Solana | Sep 30, 06:05 | Circle Treasury |
Two issuer-to-venue rotations bracket the week. On September 24 Binance sent $500.0M out of Ethereum to the Tether Treasury at 15:12 and received $500.0M back on Solana fifteen minutes later, which moved an unchanged amount onto a different network. On September 26 the same pattern ran through Bitfinex, $160.0M out of Tron at 08:03 and back on Ethereum three minutes later.
Whale Alert carried sixteen USDC Treasury mints inside the window, $3,763.1M in total 212223242526272829303132333435 — fourteen of them were 250.0M on Solana, $3,500.0M together, and two were on Ethereum, $263.1M. Against that gross issuance the feed carried a single burn of comparable scale, the $210.6M on Ethereum on September 30. Solana's circulating USDC fell $611.7M over the same seven days, so the mint series and that chain's balance moved in opposite directions by more than $4B without a public ledger to reconcile them.
The nightly large-wallet round trip on Ethereum appeared eight times in Whale Alert's feed between September 23 and September 30. Between September 23 and September 30 an address Whale Alert labels "Unknown Whale 1" drew $120.0M to $193.6M from Aave between 23:35 and 00:17 local time and returned it between five and 42 minutes later, and the returned amount matched the withdrawal to within about $50,000 on every occasion 36373839404142434445464748495051.
The last of those ran at 05:49 local time on September 30, with $120.0M out of Aave and back within five minutes. At 06:49 the same morning, $107.1M of USDC left an unlabeled Solana wallet for the Circle treasury, and eight minutes later the same amount left the treasury for an unlabeled address on Ethereum — a cross-chain move routed through the issuer.
Exchange balances as a buying-power proxy
Stablecoin float held in exchange wallets is the part of the supply that can be spent on a position without moving between chains first. The venue balances below come from wallet sets DefiLlama tracks and publishes, averaged across each of the two weeks so that a single day's wallet update does not drive the comparison.
Coinbase and Kraken sit outside every tracked wallet set reachable here, so the aggregates below understate the stablecoin balances held across exchanges as a group.
| Venue | This-week average | Prior-week average | Change | Series |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Binance | $49.025B | $48.989B | +$35.4M | Stable |
| OKX | $10.232B | $10.010B | +$222.5M | Stable |
| Bybit | $3.867B | $3.802B | +$64.9M | Mixed |
| MEXC | $2.094B | $2.155B | −$61.5M | Stable |
| KuCoin | $1.066B | $1.050B | +$16.0M | Stable |
| Bitget | $963M | $981M | −$18.4M | Mixed |
| Deribit | $814M | $743M | +$71.0M | Mixed |
| Bitfinex | $375M | $281M | +$93.4M | Volatile |
| BingX | $366M | $351M | +$14.7M | Stable |
| Gate | $298M | $300M | −$1.6M | Mixed |
| Crypto.com | $186M | $188M | −$1.4M | Mixed |
| All 80 tracked venues | $70.407B | $69.972B | +$434.8M | — |
| Venues with stable series | $63.529B | $63.300B | +$229.5M | — |
The three aggregations agree on direction and disagree on size. On the fourteen-venue set this report carried a week ago, the weekly average is $68.279B against $67.923B, a $355.9M increase. The all-venue figure is $434.8M higher. The gap between those two and the $229.5M of the stable subset comes from series that jump without money moving: Bitfinex's tracked balance swings by about a fifth of its level over the past fortnight, Bybit's by about an eighth of its level, and Poloniex's by more than 90%. Wallets entering and leaving a tracked set produce moves of that size, which is why the stable subset screens venues by how steady their daily readings are.
That subset is 28 venues holding at least $1M of the three assets whose daily readings stayed within 5% of their level over the past 14 days, and it carried $63.529B of the $70.407B total. Inside it, USDT rose to $53.097B from $52.998B and USDC to $10.410B from $10.279B 525355.
Read either way, exchange balances rose while total supply fell, and the clearest disagreement sits in USDC: the readable venues held $131.2M more USDC at the end of the week than at the start of it, while USDC's total circulating supply fell $1,369.3M. Some of the dollars that left the USDC float ended the week sitting in venue wallets.
Market cross-check
| Asset / indicator | Snapshot | Change |
|---|---|---|
| BTC | $85,130.96 2 | −0.83% over 7 days; +1.18% over 24 hours |
| ETH | $2,729.22 3 | +0.52% over 7 days; +0.29% over 24 hours |
| Crypto Fear & Greed | 71, Greed 4 | 71, Greed on September 23 |
| BTC perpetual funding, OKX | 0.0047% per 8 hours 64 | Below the venue's 0.01% baseline |
| BTC perpetual funding, Hyperliquid | 0.00125% per hour 65 | 0.03% per day, open interest $2.87B |
Prices stalled across the same seven days the stablecoin float contracted 0.38%. Bitcoin finished the week slightly below where it started and Ethereum barely above, with sentiment unchanged at 71 Greed. Perpetual funding sat at or under each venue's neutral rate: 0.0047% per eight hours on OKX's BTC swap, less than half that venue's 0.01% baseline, and 0.00125% per hour on Hyperliquid, the same reading as a week earlier. Crowded leveraged longs push those rates above their baselines, and deleveraging drives them below. Funding stayed at or under the neutral rate on both venues through the week.
A regulatory change to the plumbing underneath these balances arrived on September 29, when the Federal Reserve published a proposal that would give payment stablecoin issuers it supervises a general two-business-day limit on redemption, alongside disclosure and onboarding requirements 66. The proposal sits under public comment and would take effect, if adopted, through the Board's rulemaking.
What the snapshot establishes
- The Big-3 contracted $991.4M to $263.035B, its first weekly decline in two weeks. The move followed last week's $1,549.7M expansion 1.
- USDC carried the decline. USDC fell $1,369.3M, with $1,048.2M of it on Solana and Ethereum together, while Arbitrum added $164.3M 1.
- USDT grew while rotating. A $400.3M global gain contained $589.8M into Solana and $282.8M out of Ethereum, with Tron up $120.6M 1.
- Circle minted $3,763.1M of USDC. Fourteen 250.0M mints landed on Solana for $3,500.0M of that total, and Solana's USDC balance still fell $611.7M 21.
- Exchange buying power rose. The 28 venues with readable series averaged $229.5M higher, with USDC up $131.2M there against a $1,369.3M decline in USDC supply 52.
- Bridge-carried float shrank faster than the market. Bridge-received supply fell 1.07% to $17.569B against 0.38% for total supply, taking its share to 6.68% 1.
- Collateral venues gave back dollars. Hyperliquid L1 lost $333.8M of USDC, two-thirds of it bridge-carried, and Ethereum lost $436.5M 1.
Three dimensions sit outside what this snapshot can establish:
- Bridge route flows. Pair-by-pair USDT, USDC and DAI netflows across bridges found no free public series this report could verify. DefiLlama's bridge endpoints answer with a paid-plan prompt, and every public alternative reached across the recent attempts reports one protocol's own traffic, caps its history at minutes of records, or accepts no date range. The bridge-received stock by chain above is what the available data supports.
- Exchange coverage. Coinbase and Kraken sit outside the tracked wallet sets, so any market-wide total for exchange-held stablecoin balances would rest on an incomplete venue list.
- Gross issuance. Public ledgers of USDC and USDT issuance are partial, so the observed mint events and the net supply change are reported side by side and left unreconciled. The Solana mint series and that chain's falling balance differ by more than $4B, and a burn record large enough to close the gap is absent.
Method note: supply figures come from DeFiLlama's asset and chain snapshots taken at 2026-09-30 08:00 (UTC−05:00).
Other chains is the residual of DeFiLlama's full chain list after the named chains in each table; a chain missing from the source's list is marked as such. DeFiLlama restated several chain-level figures after last week's edition, Solana's USDC balance for September 23 by about $668M among them, so week-over-week chain figures here come from one same-moment pull and differ from a difference against the levels printed a week ago. Bridge-received figures come from the per-asset series for each stablecoin, summed across chains and taken at that series' own daily snapshot, which is dated 00:00 UTC; the chain tables are taken from the summary endpoint's snapshot later the same morning, so a chain's table change and its bridge-received change can differ by a few million dollars. Exchange balances average each venue's daily readings across the two weeks using wallet sets the venue or its proof-of-reserve disclosures publish, with the comparison weeks running September 24 to September 30 and September 17 to September 23; a venue counts as stable when it holds at least $1M of the three assets and its daily readings stay within 5% of their level over the past 14 days. Issuer and wallet events come from Whale Alert's public alerts and are treated as inventory or routing evidence. Market figures and perpetual funding use the linked public APIs. All times are UTC−05:00.For informational use only; this report offers no investment advice.
References
- 1DeFiLlama Stablecoins API
stablecoins.llama.fi
- 2CoinPaprika BTC ticker
api.coinpaprika.com
- 3CoinPaprika ETH ticker
api.coinpaprika.com
- 4Alternative.me Fear and Greed API
api.alternative.me
- 5DeFiLlama USDC endpoint
stablecoins.llama.fi
- 6DeFiLlama USDT endpoint
stablecoins.llama.fi
- 7DeFiLlama DAI endpoint
stablecoins.llama.fi
- 8
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- 51
- 52DeFiLlama tracked wallets, Binance CEX
api.llama.fi
- 53DeFiLlama tracked wallets, OKX
api.llama.fi
- 54DeFiLlama tracked wallets, Bybit
api.llama.fi
- 55DeFiLlama tracked wallets, MEXC
api.llama.fi
- 56DeFiLlama tracked wallets, KuCoin
api.llama.fi
- 57DeFiLlama tracked wallets, Bitget
api.llama.fi
- 58DeFiLlama tracked wallets, Deribit
api.llama.fi
- 59DeFiLlama tracked wallets, Bitfinex
api.llama.fi
- 60DeFiLlama tracked wallets, BingX
api.llama.fi
- 61DeFiLlama tracked wallets, Gate
api.llama.fi
- 62DeFiLlama tracked wallets, Crypto.com
api.llama.fi
- 63DeFiLlama CEX tracker
api.llama.fi
- 64
- 65Hyperliquid perpetual market data
api.hyperliquid.xyz
- 66CryptoSlate, Fed two-business-day redemption proposal
cryptoslate.com
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