Stablecoin supply is $13 billion below its May peak, but the drop came in two waves and no peg broke

Dollar stablecoins in circulation stood at $302.4 billion on Monday 26 October, about $13.1 billion below their 17 May peak of $315.5 billion, according to DefiLlama data read at 06:54 UTC on 26 October. The fall is not new and it is not one block. Stablecoin supply dropped by about $17 billion between mid-May and mid-August, won back roughly $9.5 billion by 7 October, and has lost about $5.5 billion again in the 19 days since.

USDC and Tether’s USDT account for most of the latest leg: USDC fell by about $2.6 billion and USDT by about $1.7 billion between 7 and 26 October, close to 80% of the total move. No peg broke. Every large dollar stablecoin was priced between $0.994 and $1.0004 when we read the data, so this is a story of fewer tokens in circulation, not of a coin losing its value.

The figure making the rounds this morning comes from Bitcoin.com News, which wrote on 26 October that the market had lost $12.73 billion since 22 May, to $300.36 billion on 25 October. That headline number is right on its own terms, but it uses a different DefiLlama view from the one we read, and it hides the shape of the move. Read day by day, the same data shows a slide, a partial recovery and a second, shorter slide, with two coins doing most of the work.

Stablecoin supply fell in two waves, with a rebound in between

DefiLlama’s daily chart of all stablecoins records one value per day at 00:00 UTC. Read in order, the 2026 numbers for dollar-pegged coins give a clear profile.

The year’s high, which is also the highest point in the whole series, came on 17 May at $315.54 billion. Supply then slid for about twelve weeks: $312.05 billion on 1 June, $303.38 billion on 1 July and $299.55 billion on 29 July. It then moved sideways between $298.3 billion and $299.5 billion until mid-August, with the lowest daily value, $298.33 billion, on 11 August. That first wave took roughly $17 billion out of circulation.

In July, while the first wave was still running, CoinPaprika reported that supply was down about $10 billion from the May peak and called June’s contraction of about $7.7 billion the largest monthly drop since May 2022, its own reading of the data. Paul Howard of Wincent told the site it was “a relatively small pullback in what we believe is a long-term growth market.” (CoinPaprika, 12 July 2026).

Then the money came back, partly. The total reached $302.12 billion on 29 August and $305.36 billion on 22 September, and peaked again at $307.90 billion on 7 October. From the 11 August low, that rebound added about $9.6 billion, a bit more than half of what the first wave had removed.

The second wave started straight after. DefiLlama shows $305.52 billion on 15 October, $303.74 billion on 20 October, $302.60 billion on 25 October and $302.43 billion on 26 October. That is about $5.5 billion in 19 days. Per day, that is a faster pace than the summer slide (about $0.29 billion against $0.20 billion), but the move is much smaller in size.

Two dates are worth keeping apart. The total peaked in May, yet USDC on its own peaked earlier, at $79.63 billion on 18 March, and was already lower by the time the overall market turned. USDT peaked on 20 May at $190.43 billion, three days after the total.

Why DefiLlama gives $300 billion in one place and $303 billion in another

Readers comparing articles this week will see different totals, all credited to DefiLlama. They do not contradict each other so much as measure slightly different things.

• Bitcoin.com News quotes $300.36 billion for 25 October, which matches the figure shown on DefiLlama’s website dashboard (about $300.3 billion in search previews of that page; we could not load it ourselves).
• The raw chart endpoint of DefiLlama’s public API gives $302.60 billion for the same day and $302.43 billion for 26 October.
• Adding up every dollar-pegged asset in DefiLlama’s list of stablecoins gives about $303.2 billion at 06:54 UTC on 26 October.

So the gap is about $2 to $3 billion depending on the view. We have not been able to confirm which filters the dashboard applies. The likely explanation is that it leaves out some assets or chains that the raw totals include, but that is our reading, not something DefiLlama has stated. In this article, every total we quote comes from the chart endpoint, and every coin-level number comes from the stablecoin list, both read at 06:54 UTC.

The peak also depends on the data set. Some other trackers put the May high at about $322 billion; we have not verified those figures, and the size of the drop changes with the source. What does not change is the direction: on every view we checked, supply is lower now than in May and lower than on 7 October.

USDC and Tether did most of the shrinking

The coin-level data from DefiLlama compares each stablecoin’s live circulation with its level a week and a month earlier. Because the live value is taken during the day, it can sit slightly below the 00:00 UTC daily figure. The table shows the main dollar stablecoins at 06:54 UTC on 26 October.

Source: DefiLlama stablecoins API, read at 06:54 UTC on 26 October 2026. Changes are rounded to $10 million.

USDC stands out over a month: $3.78 billion lower, more than every other coin in the table put together. Bitcoin.com News, using 25 October figures and a 13-token basket, counts a net monthly decline of $5.82 billion and says USDC is about 80% of it. Over the past week the picture is more balanced, with USDT down $1.11 billion and USDC down $0.90 billion.

Measured from DefiLlama’s daily values, USDC went from $74.31 billion on 7 October to $71.71 billion on 26 October. USDT went from $184.20 billion to $182.46 billion over the same days. Tether is still about $8 billion below its May peak, and its low for the year was $182.13 billion on 11 August, so the current level is close to that floor.

Weekly mint and redeem reports, which cite unnamed on-chain data and which we treat only as colour, point the same way for USDC. One report, published on 11 October, said $10.5 billion was redeemed against $9.7 billion issued over the previous week; another put the week to 15 October at $11.4 billion redeemed against $10.9 billion issued. In other words, Circle is still issuing billions each week, but holders are cashing out a little more than that. The BIS has described a related pattern: in a paper we covered last week, higher bank rates slow stablecoin growth, and USDC reacts more than Tether. That paper studies the long run; it does not explain this particular month.

The smaller coins went both ways

Ethena’s USDe lost $0.35 billion in 30 days and World Liberty Financial’s USD1 $0.46 billion, about 10% of its supply according to Bitcoin.com News. USD1 has been in the news for other reasons this week, after a Circle shareholder sued Trump and World Liberty over UAE money in USD1. On the other side, PayPal’s PYUSD gained $0.15 billion, Sky’s USDS $0.24 billion and Falcon’s USDf $0.51 billion.

Two coins look like big winners in the raw data and are not. USDD ($1.77 billion) and Open USD, or OUSD ($0.84 billion), show a 30-day gain equal to their whole supply. That only means DefiLlama was not tracking them a month ago. They were added to the count; they did not grow by that amount, and they do not offset the fall elsewhere.

Stablecoin supply by chain: Ethereum lost, Tron grew

Summing each dollar stablecoin’s balance per blockchain from the same API, at 06:54 UTC on 26 October, gives an approximate map. Ethereum holds about $144 billion, down about $1.6 billion over 30 days and $1.1 billion over seven. Tron holds about $94 billion and is up about $1.1 billion over 30 days, though it slipped about $0.5 billion in the last week. Solana is near $15.9 billion (down about $0.8 billion in 30 days), BNB Chain about $14.3 billion and Hyperliquid’s L1 about $6.9 billion (down about $0.8 billion). Base and Arbitrum barely moved.

DefiLlama’s separate chain endpoint gives slightly different totals (for example about $142.7 billion for Ethereum and $13.1 billion for BNB Chain), another definitions gap, so treat these as orders of magnitude. The reading holds either way: the loss sits mostly on Ethereum, where USDC is strongest, while Tron still grew over the month.

What falling stablecoin supply says about crypto buyers, and what it does not

Stablecoins are the cash side of crypto trading. Traders park dollars in them between positions, exchanges use them as their main quote currency, and DeFi protocols lend them. When supply shrinks, there are fewer on-chain dollars available to buy anything. Our guide to what stablecoins are and how they keep their peg covers the basics.

Bitcoin.com News headlined the fall as crypto’s “dry powder” running thin, meaning less cash waiting on the sidelines to buy. That is an interpretation, and a reasonable one to test, but the data has limits. DefiLlama counts tokens in circulation. It does not say whether those tokens sit on exchanges, in DeFi pools, in payment apps or in a company treasury, and it says nothing about whether holders plan to buy. A stablecoin used to pay a supplier and one waiting on an exchange count the same.

The same Bitcoin.com piece also allows that the dollars may simply be moving: “The money might not be disappearing so much as finding somewhere else to sit,” it wrote. Where they went is not visible in this data.

Supply is also different from activity. Coinbase’s recent report counted $891 billion of “filtered” stablecoin volume in a quarter, a measure of money moving, not of money outstanding; we explained what that filtered figure measures. A coin can move many times a day while its total supply falls.

The market backdrop is weak but not broken. Bitcoin traded near $79,910 at 06:48 UTC on 26 October, down 0.7% over 24 hours and 3.1% over seven days, and total crypto market value was about $2.67 trillion at the same time. Bitcoin.com News puts the record near $126,000, set in October 2025.

The reasons for the drop are not established

No issuer has explained the redemptions, and we found no statement from Circle or Tether about this period. Several explanations are being offered, and they are possibilities, not findings.

• Traders leaving the market as prices fall, redeeming stablecoins into bank dollars rather than holding them on-chain.
• Holders moving into products that pay interest, which payment stablecoins do not. This is plausible when bank and Treasury rates are high, but we have no figure to confirm it for this period.
• Issuer-specific flows, such as large USDC redemptions by a few institutions; the weekly reports show redemptions slightly ahead of mints, without naming who redeemed.
• Changes in how trackers count coins, which can move totals by billions on their own, as the gap between DefiLlama views shows.

We could not check whether the August-to-October rebound came from new money or partly from coins being added to the count. Circle’s transparency page says USDC reserves are held mostly in the Circle Reserve Fund, a government money-market fund, and reports weekly, but the circulation figure was not readable in the version we could access, so we have not used it. Tether’s Q3 attestation, which would give an issuer figure for 30 September, is not out yet.

For more on how the two largest coins differ in reserves, issuer and use, see our comparison of USDT and USDC.

For euro holders, this is a dollar story

The fall concerns dollar coins. Euro stablecoins are small in this data: DefiLlama’s chart puts euro-pegged circulation at about $0.84 billion on 26 October. For readers in France, Italy and the rest of the EU, the rules that matter most are MiCA’s: ESMA has given crypto firms until January to stop offering stablecoins that are not MiCA-compliant and French MPs have voted, at first reading only, to tax swaps into USDC and EURC from 2027. None of that changes the supply figures above, which are global.

What to watch next

The Federal Reserve holds its meeting on 27 and 28 October, with the rate decision due on Wednesday 28 October. Rates matter here because they set what a dollar earns outside crypto. US spot crypto ETFs trade again from today. Tether’s third-quarter attestation is expected in the coming weeks; the exact date has not been announced. Circle is expected to report its third-quarter results in November. In the data itself, the next useful signal is simple: whether the daily DefiLlama total stops falling below the $302 billion area, or goes back toward the $298.33 billion low of 11 August.