Stablecoin Market Adds Two-Point-Five Billion in a Week Confidence Builds Around Regulatory Clarity
The fiat-pegged corner of crypto added fresh ballast last week, ending the 25 May Asia close with a combined capitalisation of US $246.365 billion, up 1.02 percent in seven days—roughly US $2.49 billion in net new tokens. Tether’s USDT remains the fulcrum: its float reached US $153.365 billion, equal to 62.25 percent of all outstanding stablecoins. USD Coin followed at US $61.242 billion (24.86 percent), while Ethena’s hedge-backed USDe and MakerDAO’s over-collateralised DAI stood at US $5.218 billion (2.12 percent) and US $4.520 billion (1.83 percent) respectively.
Net issuance patterns show that dollars continue to favour fiat-backed structures over crypto-collateralised designs despite higher nominal yields on Maker’s DAI Savings Rate; the latter drew only marginal supply, leaving the combined capital of over-collateralised tokens barely above US $12 billion. In trading terms, stablecoins retained their role as the dominant quote asset: aggregated spot venues settled more than 70 percent of Bitcoin and Ether volume against USDT pairs, a share unchanged week-on-week even as broader crypto turnover pulled back with the expiry of May futures. The headline 1-percent expansion therefore understates the practical effect: it injects fresh dollar liquidity into an ecosystem where most derivatives remain margined in stable assets, lowering funding costs for perpetual swaps and smoothing collateral management for market-makers.
Settlement Geography Tilts Toward Low-Fee Networks
While issuer concentration has barely budged, the underlying rails are shifting rapidly. Tron now carries about US $75.7 billion of USDT, more than half the token’s circulating supply, and clears an average US $19 billion in on-chain transfers each day—a throughput edge born of sub-cent fees and high finality. Ethereum still houses the bulk of institutional liquidity but ceded relative share as gas costs fluctuated between 25 and 40 gwei during the week. Solana’s stablecoin base hit US $12.5 billion after a 145-percent quarter-on-quarter surge, elevating the high-speed chain to third place behind Tron and Ethereum. Most of that Solana growth came from USDC mints that followed the launch of meme-driven liquidity pools earlier in the year; the resulting deep order books now let arbitrage desks move seven-figure blocks at less than two basis points of slippage.
BNB Smart Chain, Arbitrum and Base together account for another US $17 billion, but their week-over-week balances were flat, reflecting a pause in speculative flows after April’s layer-two airdrop season subsided. The dispersion across chains matters for two reasons. First, it forces issuers to keep real-time, multi-chain treasury operations so that redemptions clear without delay; second, it compresses blended transaction costs for end-users as each network competes on latency and price. In effect, stablecoin users are enjoying the same routing arbitrage that once defined retail foreign-exchange platforms—only now the spread is measured in fractions of a cent and settles in near real-time.
Macro and Micro Catalysts Behind the Uptick
Three contemporaneous forces explain the fresh demand without resorting to forecasts. Yield differentials narrowed: the three-month U.S. Treasury bill slipped nine basis points during the week on cooler core-PCE whispers, trimming the gap between government cash and top decentralised lending pools to a wafer-thin 24 basis points.
Where off-chain savers hesitated, on-chain protocols offering delta-neutral or Treasury-backed wrappers soaked up dollars—yield-bearing stablecoins now represent 4.5 percent of total supply, double their share six months ago. Reserve transparency improved at the same time: Tether’s Q1 attestation, published 1 May, confirmed nearly US $120 billion in short-dated U.S. Treasuries and more than US $1 billion in quarterly profit, easing long-running solvency questions and encouraging professional desks to lift counterparty limits. Finally, legislative momentum added a credibility premium. The U.S. Senate’s 66–22 procedural vote on the GENIUS Act on 19 May did not change the law overnight, yet it demonstrated cross-party appetite for a federal charter that would codify reserve requirements and bankruptcy remoteness—two features the largest issuers already observe voluntarily. The prospect of unified rules removed a lingering regulatory overhang and coincided with the week’s $2.5-billion issuance burst, suggesting at least a correlation between policy clarity and on-chain dollar demand.
Together these factors describe a market that is expanding not through speculative leverage but through incremental confidence in both the assets’ backing and the networks that move them—an important distinction for risk desks that treat stablecoins as cash equivalents on the balance sheet.