Thread by @lawmaster

1/ Stablecoin have seen incredible growth in the last year - $54B issued and $380B monthly on-chain volume.

We are finally releasing the 130+ page monster today. It’s the most comprehensive report on stablecoins released, you can read it fro free here:

theblockcrypto.com/post/97769/sta…

2/ Some summary growth stats since jan 2020:

• Supply = $5.9B → $54.2B
• Monthly Tx volume = $23.5B → $384B
• Addresses holdings >$100 = 284k → 1.85M
• Daily active addresses = 53k → 307k
• Daily transactions = 98k → 594k

Not many products with bigger growth.

3/ Main reasons for the growth:

• Miners repaying Tether debt against Bitcoin

• Popularity of Tether-collateralized derivatives exploded

• DeFi and the yield farming craze

• Bitcoin losing its lead as a base currency in spot

• Increased demand for Bitcoin from insti

4/ In 2020, more than $1T has been transacted with stablecoins in 110M transactions. PayPal had $936B of payments volume in 15.4B transactions. The difference in the use case is apparent from the avg payment size - $60 for PayPal and more than $9,000 for stablecoins.

5/ Because of high fees and the main usecase still being trading, the vast majority of stablecoin tx are higher than $100. Almost 40% of all transactions are from $100 to $1k.

6/ A massive portion of stablecoins is actually held by Binance. This data is from the end of January but back then it was almost $10 billion. A ton of stablecoins are also locked in DeFi protocols. Most in Curve, Aave and Uniswap.

7/ About 40% of the supply is sitting on exchanges, 11% on DeFi and the rest elsewhere (individual wallets, OTC desks, trading firms, etc.)

8/ This chart shows that two most popular stablecoins are being used by different regions. Tether is most used by Asia and USDC by America. This corresponds to Tether’s early success on Asian exchanges

9/ The vast majority of stablecoins are collateralized by fiat - about 96%. This is because it’s the most scalable method at the moment and easiest when it comes to execution

10/ At the end of January, 70% of the supply was on Ethereum, 27% on TRON and 3% on OMNI.

11/ What’s crazy is that more than 99% of the total stablecoin supply is in USD. Again, this is mainly because traders prefer USD but also because it’s much harder to monetize non-USD stablecoins - interest is lower.

12/ We couldn’t write a thread on stablecoins not pointing out Tether’s domination. Tether has:

• 69% of the supply (nice!)
• 63% of tx volume
• 87% of addresses holding >$100
• 88% of daily active addresses
• 89% of daily transactions

13/ There is so much more in the report so go at least skim it and share it if you like it. Massive thanks to @MillennialMike7 and @lars_hl for co-authoring this report and thanks to @GMOGroup who commissioned it.

Direct link to read the report for convenience is here: tbstat.com/wp/uploads/202…