Stablecoin Supply

Stablecoin Supply plots the aggregate USD market cap of every tracked dollar-pegged stablecoin as a single area on the right linear axis. Bitcoin’s USD price runs muted on the left log scale for cycle context. Coverage starts 25 February 2015, when the float was effectively a single issuer (USDT) at a small fraction of its current scale, and runs to the most recent close. The line is non-monotonic by construction: it rises with mints and falls with redemptions, with stress windows producing visible drawdowns.

Today’s aggregate float sits at $272.45B — Stable. Over the trailing month the pool has changed by +2.1%; over the trailing quarter, +4.2%. The series carries 4,078 daily observations. The float refreshes overnight; spot in the reading row above auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser.

The construction is a straight sum:

Aggregate float(t) = Σi circulating_supplyi(t)

across every tracked USD-pegged stablecoin i, with each issuer’s circulating supply valued at the $1.00 peg. Provenance for the per-issuer feeds is documented on the data sources page. Wrapped representations of the same underlying token (e.g. bridged USDC on multiple chains) are deduplicated by issuer to avoid double-counting.

The regime classifier on the reading row is keyed off the trailing 30-day percent change in the aggregate, not an absolute level. Aggregate float has grown by orders of magnitude since 2015 — from sub-billion to hundreds of billions — so a fixed dollar threshold would be meaningless; the percent-change framing stays calibrated. Thresholds: > +5% reads as Expansion; < −2% reads as Contraction; between those is Stable.

Two notes on what the signal does and does not see. First, mints are on-chain events, not market events — a $1B Tether mint shows up as a clean step in the float regardless of whether the underlying counterparty is buying Bitcoin, paying for soybean shipments, or settling an inter-exchange redemption. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has framed the company’s on-chain mints as authorized but not issued… this amount will be used as inventory for next period issuance requests and chain swaps ( X.com, 13 August 2024). Second, redemptions are gated by the issuer’s banking infrastructure — the SVB week showed how that gate can close.

The chart resolves three regimes against the 30-day momentum threshold. Sustained Expansion (over +5% per month) has clustered with bull-cycle phases — the 2020 DeFi summer, the 2024 ETF-launch window. Sustained Contraction (under −2% per month) has clustered with stress windows: the 2018 ICO bust, the 2022 Luna and FTX cascades, and the March 2023 USDC SVB week. The Stable middle band covers most days — the float drifts upward in its long-run structural pace and the indicator is designed to not ring alarm bells on routine growth.

Reading the float against canonical cycle anchors makes the structural growth visible. The 2017 cycle top printed an aggregate of barely $1.4B — stablecoins were a single-issuer experiment. By the 2021 cycle top the float had grown a hundredfold; the 2022 March peak saw the all-time high before Luna’s collapse compressed it. The 2023 USDC SVB week prints visibly in the daily series; the 2024 ETF launch coincided with the next leg of growth.

The cleanest stress test of “aggregate float at a $1 peg” in the indicator’s history is the second weekend of March 2023. Silicon Valley Bank closed on Friday 10 March 2023; later that night, Circle disclosed via its public statement that $3.3 billion of USDC reserves — roughly 8% of total — were stuck at SVB. By 2am ET Saturday 11 March, USDC was changing hands on secondary venues at $0.87, a 13% break from the peg. The aggregate-float chart did not record the depeg as a price event — it values every coin at $1.00 by construction — but the underlying issuer was, for 36 hours, an open question of redeemability.

The Treasury, Federal Reserve and FDIC issued a joint statement on Sunday 12 March guaranteeing all SVB depositors. Circle restored redemptions on Monday 13 March and USDC re-pegged to ~$1.00. The on-chain reconstruction shows the float did contract afterwards, as some holders moved into USDT, treasuries or fiat:

Two takeaways the chart deserves.

The peg is an issuer-credit assertion, not a market clearing. The aggregate float values every USDC token at $1.00 by construction, regardless of whether the underlying redemption is being honoured. During a 36-hour window in March 2023, the secondary-market clearing price said $0.87 and the aggregate-float chart said par. The chart was not wrong — it is reporting issuance, not market price — but it was incomplete. Aggregate supply expanding does not always mean dry-powder accumulating; aggregate supply flat does not always mean a stable peg.

Composition risk is hidden in the aggregate. One issuer stumbling does not register on the float for as long as the peg holds; only when redemptions happen at the wrong end of the issuer’s balance sheet does it. The NYDFS BUSD wind-down of February 2023 took roughly $16B out of the float over several months — a regulatory event, not a market event, with Paxos halting new mints and the issuing platform retiring the float through redemption. The chart records it as a slow Contraction. Per-issuer breakdown matters more than the aggregate when individual-issuer credit is in question; the aggregate hides composition entirely.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. Light signal. Aggregate float is one of several macro proxies for the cryptoasset complex’s breadth; a steady weekly buy is broadly insensitive to it. Skim the regime line for cycle texture; otherwise this chart is not for you.

For a cycle-timing trader. Treat sustained Expansion as confirmation that broader liquidity is rebuilding inside the cryptoasset perimeter, with a noisy and unstable lead over Bitcoin price. Sustained Contraction has been a more reliable coincident indicator of stress — the 2018 bust, the 2022 cascades, the 2023 USDC week all printed clean Contractions. Pair with dominance to disentangle stablecoin-driven dominance moves from altcoin-driven ones, and with ETF flows to track the regulated leg of dollar-into-crypto demand.

For a researcher. The series, the 30/90-day percent changes and the daily timestamps are the only inputs the chart needs. Per-issuer composition is not surfaced here — we ship the aggregate as the macro signal. Composition matters more than the aggregate during issuer-credit events; in those windows the indicator carries less information than per-issuer reserve attestations and proof-of-reserves disclosures.

Aggregate supply at $1.00 is not the same as redeemable-at-$1.00. The float values every issuer’s circulating supply at the peg, regardless of whether the underlying redemption is being honoured. The USDC SVB week (10–13 March 2023) saw secondary markets clear at $0.87 while the aggregate chart kept printing par. Read the float as an issuance signal, not a market-clearing one.

Issuance-vs-redemption asymmetry breaks signal symmetry. A Tether mint can be inventory replenishment with no immediate market expression — the company has been explicit about “authorized but not issued” mints to treasury. Conversely, a USDC redemption by a single institutional treasury for routine cash management can compress the aggregate without changing crypto demand. The indicator is descriptive on the order of months and noisy day-to-day.

Composition is invisible in the aggregate. The NYDFS BUSD wind-down (13 February 2023) removed ~$16B of float over several months as Paxos halted minting and the issuing platform retired the float through redemption. The chart records that as a slow Contraction; per-issuer breakdown would have shown the structural shift more clearly. When a single issuer’s credit is in question, the aggregate hides the relevant signal.

Not every dollar of float is waiting to buy crypto. A meaningful fraction of USDT circulates inside emerging-market trade finance and remittance rails — the “digital dollar” use case for jurisdictions where access to the U.S. banking system is fraught. There is no clean way to net that fraction out from the aggregate; the float is a strict upper bound on crypto-side dry powder, not a precise gauge of it.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” block for stablecoin market cap, answered against the data on this page.