Stablecoins are now well established in the crypto markets and have become an integral and essential part of it. What’s even more interesting is that with the new US administration, the first legislative from the crypto industry was the act on stablecoins. The path is now clear for creating legal and compliant stablecoins. The act was put in place in 2025. Let’s check how the stablecoins are doing with this new regulatory clarity but also having in mind the crypto downtrend these days.
In the last few years, the stablecoins market cap seems to be more concentrated around Tether USDT and Circles USDC. In the past we had Binance USD – BUSD, then the now collapsed Terra UST, DAI was also relatively bigger than it is now and rebranded as USDS. Some new stablecoins appeared but those are still with relatively small market cap.
Apart from the fiat backed stablecoins (USDT, USDC, ….) that are keeping dollars in the banks or equivalent like T-bills, there are tokens like DAI, HBD that are backed by other crypto as collateral, and/or using conversion on chain operations to maintain the peg.
Here we will be looking at:
- Tether [USDT]
- USD Coin [USDC]
- USDS / Dai
- Ethena USD [USDe]
- PayPal USD [PYUSD]
- USD1 – World Libery
There are a few more out but we will focus on the above as the biggest ones in market cap.
Tether [USDT]
Tether is the oldest stablecoin in crypto. It has been around since 2015. Allegedly it is founded by the Bitfinex exchange. There was a lot of controversy around this coin in the past, including court cases. The main issue that has been raised has been is each coin backed by one dollar in the bank. Tether is an offshore company with a location outside of the US jurisdiction. With the new stablecoin act in the US Tether is set to become onshore company within the next three years.
Tether has survived multiple crashes and run on the banks in the last years, and it has proven itself to work as intended in the mist of the biggest chaos in the crypto industry.
Here is the market cap for Tether.
As mentioned, Tether started operating back in 2015, but it gained some significant market cap for the first time in 2017. A real bull run and a massive increase in the market cap happened in 2021 when its market cap went from under 10B to more than 83B.
Then in 2022 there was the crypto crash and the Tether market cap contracted from 83B to 65B. In 2023 it started growing again and continued to grow since then.
In 2024 and 2025 Tether added close to 100B in its market cap. From 90B at the beginning of 2024 close to 190 at the end of 2025.
In 2026 there was a small drop in the market cap in the first two months, but in the last month it continue to grow and it is now at new ATH again.
USD Coin [USDC]
USDC is a common project between Circle and Coinbase. It is a US based company.
Here is the chart.
USDC was founded back in 2018 and it gained real momentum in 2021, when it reached close to 60B. A drop followed afterwards in 2022, and even bigger drop in the first half of 2023 due to a bank crisis in the US. In March 2023, one of the banks where USDC had a share of its reserves in USD collapsed, causing the market to panic and pushing down the peg of USDC as low as 88 cents. This was short lived and the USDC peg recovered in a day or two, and later it even managed to get access to its funds in the collapsed bank. But the damage was done, and a lot of funds exited from USDC.
In 2024 the USDC market cap started growing again and has continued since then and it is now close to 80B, reaching a new ATH.
Some small ups and downs in the last months but still holding around the 80B mark.
USDT vs USDC
When we plot the market cap of the two biggest stablecoins we get this.
After the growth of both of these coins back in 2021, in 2022 and 2023 the market cap of these two has been inversely correlated. Whenever Tether lost market cap, USDC gained.
Since 2024 for the first time in a while both coins started growing again, although we can notice that Tether is growing faster than USDC. The growth continues in 2025 despite the drop in the crypto prices. Tether is now in massive lead in the first spot, outpacing the closest competitor by a lot.
Ethena USD [USDe]
Ethena is a type of synthetic dollar that is dollar backed by a “delta-neutral” position that goes long spot stETH (and BTC) and simultaneously short an equivalent ETH-PERP (and BTC-PERP) position. The net effect is that both positions offset one another and therefore USDe is theoretically able to maintain its 1:1 peg.
Ethena is the new kid on the block and has been growing significantly in 2025 up to October 2025. When the big drop in the crypto prices happened in October 2025, USDe lost its peg on some exchanges and since then its market cap has fallen significantly.
Another sharp drop from 6B to 4B happened just recently when there was a hack on the rsETH and some positions on AAVE had bad debt.
USDS
USDS or formerly DAI is the decentralized version for stablecoin. It runs as a smart contract on Ethereum. Everyone can use the MakerDAO protocol, now called SKY, deposit collateral and generate stablecoin as a loan.
USDS / DAI works as overcollateralized stablecoin, where users put in crypto assets to mint USDS / DAI.
DAI was established back in 2019, it grew through 2021 a lot reaching 10B market cap, and it has been in decline since then up November 2023.
There was a rebranding happening in 2024 when USDS was introduced and users were pushed to that version. Both DAI and USDS now exist but it is USDS that leads the way. DAI can be converted to USDS at 1 to 1.
The main difference is that DAI is the old school decentralized stablecoin where users can mint tokens by themself by locking collateral like BTC, ETH and it cant be frozen. USDS has freeze button and it is more centralized and regulator friendly. The minting is mostly done by so called sub-DAOs, SkyStars, that can mint tokens on other chains, but also a real world assets RWAs like treasury bills to include as collateral.
As we can see the market cap of USDS has now reached close to 12B, reaching the previous height of DAI. Although the pivot to centralization here is obvious, it is probably under pressure from regulators.
USD1, pyUSD and more…
USD1 is the new kid on the block started back in April 2025. It is related to the Trump family. The Paypal stablecoin pyUSD has also entered the game and has grown fast and is closing on 4B now. Some other tokens have emerged as Falcon USD, Ripple USD, etc.
Cumulative Stablecoins Market Cap
Here is the chart for the total stablecoins market cap.
This is the long term chart for the stablecoins. We can see the overall trend here that most of the stablecoins capitalization came in 2021, with Tether emerging as the first, followed by USDC and DAI. We can see the rise and fall of BUSD around 2021.
At this moment Tether and USDC have more than 85% share of the market cap. Tether just keeps dominating through the years.
The overall stablecoins market cap has reached a new ATH of more than 300B!
For context on a longer timeframe, on a yearly basis the market cap for stablecoins looks like this.
After an explosive growth in 2021, the stablecoins market cap has been dropping in 2022 and 2023 and now has been growing again in 2024 and 2025.
Top Stablecoins Market Share
Here is the chart for the market share of the top stablecoins.
Tether USDT is still dominant. The harsh regulation in the US on stablecoins has probably contributed to this. Things might change now with more clarity about the stablecoins issuers in the US.
Tether USDT now holds 61% share in the stablecoins industry. USDC is in the second spot with 25% share followed by USDS and USD1 with share.
