USDC is moving far more aggressively on-chain than USDT, even though USDT still has a market cap lead of more than $100 billion. According to a Coin Metrics analysis written by Tanay Ved and translated by Foresight News, USDC’s annualized turnover on adjusted supply reached 741x in 2026, compared with 74x for USDT.
The study frames turnover as a way to measure how actively stablecoin balances circulate on-chain, rather than how much supply exists. On that measure, USDC stands out.
Stablecoins have also moved beyond their earlier role as trading instruments and now function as core on-chain liquidity rails, supporting value storage, transfers, and settlement around the clock. Since 2025, stablecoin settlement volume on-chain has decoupled from spot crypto trading volume. This year, adjusted stablecoin transfer volume at one point rose above $250 billion in a single day, while exchange trading volume fell to roughly $18 billion a day.
Year to date in 2026, adjusted stablecoin transfers totaled $41.7 trillion. Total supply has pulled back recently, but the frequency with which each unit of capital moves on-chain has kept rising. The report points to a wider set of use cases as well, including exchange liquidity management, DeFi collateral movement, personal payments, and cross-border treasury flows for businesses.
Turnover, not just supply, separates USDC from USDT
The report treats issuance as the monetary base of a stablecoin and turnover as a measure of how often that supply changes hands on-chain. Put together, the two metrics help show whether a token is being actively used or mostly held as a store of value.
It links that distinction to the core logic of the CLARITY Act, which the article says encourages incentives based on real transaction activity rather than passive token holding.
By that yardstick, USDC has a clear edge. The report’s 2026 figures show annualized turnover on adjusted supply at 741x for USDC and 74x for USDT. In practical terms, USDC changes hands much more often on-chain relative to its circulating base.
The article says the 2025 passage of the GENIUS Act gave USDC a regulatory tailwind in the US market, reinforcing its position in compliant finance, DeFi, and institutional settlement. USDT, by contrast, continues to benefit from its first-mover position, demand in overseas emerging markets, and its close link with Tron, where appetite for dollar exposure and cross-border remittances remains strong.
USDC still leads transfer volume, though the gap has narrowed
Circle’s USDC overtook USDT in adjusted transfer volume back in 2024, and the lead remained in place through 2026. As of August 2026, USDC had processed $32 trillion in cumulative settlement transfers, equal to 77% of the stablecoin market by that measure. USDT stood at $8 trillion, or 19%.
USDC still leads, but the distance between the two has narrowed, with USDC’s daily transfer volume slipping back below $100 billion.
Circle’s second-quarter 2026 earnings report showed USDC on-chain transaction volume rose 151% year over year to $14.8 trillion. Supply growth, however, lagged well behind transaction growth. The article says about 95% of Circle’s revenue still comes from reserve interest rather than transaction fees. It also points to Circle’s in-house Layer 1 chain, Arc, as an important part of the company’s effort to build a fee-based revenue stream.
How the study classified stablecoin transfers
To identify what sits behind the large transfer counts, the researchers extended the framework used in an earlier study of USDC activity on Base. They used a bottom-up method and marked the contracts and wallets most likely to generate high-frequency mechanical transfers: major flash-loan lending protocols, large DEX liquidity pools on each chain, and known exchange wallet addresses.
Transactions were grouped into three categories:
- flash loans
- DEX liquidity provision
- centralized exchange-related fund flows
The underlying data came from Talos raw transfer records. The report notes that the tagged categories should be treated as a lower-bound estimate, with the remaining unclassified share likely including payments, bridge transfers, treasury operations, and other settlement activity.
USDC on Base: concentrated activity dominated by liquidity strategies
Base, the Layer 2 network launched by Coinbase, was the main venue for USDC transfers in 2026. Activity was highly concentrated: more than 90% of USDC transfers on Base passed through just three contracts.
Across the year, Aerodrome’s decentralized exchange liquidity-making activity generated the largest share of volume. In the second half, flash-loan arbitrage built on Morpho accelerated quickly. On one day in June, flash-loan transfer volume topped $500 billion. The article says Base’s low fees and deep USDC liquidity make it well suited for large-scale, high-frequency automated strategies.
- Flash loans: 23%
- DEX liquidity provision: 69%
- Other: about 8%
The report describes the flash-loan share as bot-driven activity in which borrowing and repayment happen within a single transaction, using Morpho’s unified contract for cross-market arbitrage. The DEX share largely reflects automated strategies that keep adjusting liquidity across two major Aerodrome pools as prices move, creating large headline transfer volume with little change in net capital or inventory.
USDC on Ethereum: flash loans account for 65%
Ethereum shows a different mix. USDC transfers there are even more concentrated in flash loans, which made up 65% of total transfer volume, nearly triple the share seen on Base.
The article attributes that to Ethereum’s deep USDC liquidity and more developed lending stack, which support large-scale flash-loan arbitrage. At the same time, higher gas costs make it less practical for the kind of nonstop liquidity rebalancing seen on Base.
- Flash loans: 65%
- DEX liquidity provision: 0.3%
- Centralized exchange-related flows: 2%
- Other unclassified activity: about 33%
USDT on Ethereum: more exchange flow than USDC
On Ethereum, USDT also shows a large flash-loan component, but not as large as USDC on the same chain. Exchange-related flows take a bigger share, matching USDT’s longstanding role in exchange settlement and liquidity management.
The dataset for that category includes known deposit and withdrawal wallets at exchanges such as Binance and OKX, as well as user transfers and internal movement between hot and cold wallets.
- Flash loans: 46%
- DEX liquidity provision: 0.3%, mainly the Uniswap V3 USDT/WETH pool
- Centralized exchange-related flows: 9%, covering deposits and withdrawals across wallets tied to more than 30 centralized exchanges
- Other unclassified activity: about 45%
USDT on Tron: little visible DeFi activity, much larger unclassified volume
Tron looks very different. The flash-loan and DEX market-making patterns that drive a large share of transfer volume on Base and Ethereum were almost negligible here.
Among the identifiable flows, centralized exchange transfers made up the largest share, reinforcing Tron’s role as a low-cost rail for exchange deposits and withdrawals. Unclassified activity reached about 80%, the highest among the chains in the study. The article says that bucket most likely includes cross-border remittances and other payment scenarios.
- Flash loans: almost no scale, with no meaningful related volume detected from lending protocols such as JustLend
- DEX liquidity provision: 0.2%, spread across four Sunswap pools
- Centralized exchange-related flows: 19%, covering wallet activity at 33 overseas exchanges including Binance, OKX, and Bybit
- Other unclassified activity: about 80%
What the chain-by-chain split shows
The results draw a clear structural contrast across stablecoin ecosystems. On Base and Ethereum, USDC transfer volume is driven mainly by flash loans and liquidity rebalancing. On Ethereum, USDT combines flash-loan use with exchange-related transfers. On Tron, USDT shows almost no large-scale DeFi turnover and the biggest pool of untagged activity in the study.
Large stablecoin transfer volume is not the same as payment volume
The article closes with a warning about how these numbers should be read. Stablecoin transfer volume has reached a scale large enough to invite comparisons with major global payment networks, but most of today’s activity is still internal to the crypto market. That includes liquidity deployment and rebalancing, arbitrage execution, and settlement across platforms.
The report does not dismiss those flows. It says they are real and useful because they improve liquidity, trading efficiency, and global access to crypto markets. But it also says headline transfer counts should not be treated as a direct proxy for consumer payments or real-economy activity. At this stage, stablecoins still function primarily as settlement infrastructure for crypto markets, while payments, remittances, and corporate B2B usage are still developing. Differences in supply and turnover offer a more direct way to see how stablecoin capital is actually moving and being allocated.