I just finished reading the Dune analysis on stablecoins, and honestly, the data it revealed is crazy. People focus on the fact that the total stablecoin market has reached $300 billion, but no one is asking the right questions: who actually owns these assets? How many transactions happen daily? Are they truly serving the real economy or just sitting idle as dormant funds?

Let me share what caught my attention. USDT and USDC control 89% of the market, but their movement patterns are completely different. USDC circulates rapidly on Base Chain, about 14 times a day, while USDT on Ethereum is almost static at just 0.2 times. This means a huge amount of USDT is held as stock, not actively in use.

The worrying part is the concentration. New stablecoins like USDS, USDF, and USD0 have terrifying ownership distributions. Only nine wallets hold 90% of USDS, and 99% of USD0 is concentrated in a few accounts. This is very different from USDT and USDC, where the distribution is much broader. When concentration is this high, the risk of deviation from the reference value becomes very real.

Now, the interesting part: transaction volume in January reached $10.3 trillion, more than double last year. But this number hides a complex story. $5.9 trillion was just adding and removing liquidity from DEX pools, and $1.3 trillion was cross-chain transfers. This means most of the activity isn’t real payments or cross-border transfers, but high-frequency trading activity.

Base Chain is king here. Transaction volume hit $5.9 trillion, while the actual circulating supply is only $4.4 billion. This means the same dollar is circulating hundreds of times. In contrast, Tron, with $84 billion in stablecoins, has only $682 billion in transaction volume. This reflects that Tron functions more as a stable payment channel rather than a high-activity trading platform.

There’s also an important development: stablecoins in local currencies are starting to grow. The euro, Brazilian real, Japanese yen, even the Kenyan shilling and Nigerian naira now have stable versions on the blockchain. The current volume is small—only $1.2 billion—but it clearly indicates a trend toward local digital currencies.

What I like about this analysis is that it goes beyond surface numbers. It doesn’t just say, “There’s $300 billion,” but tells you exactly where that money is, who owns it, and how it moves. This kind of detailed data is what institutions and regulators need to truly understand the market. The data is now available on Dune, and anyone willing to dig deeper can see all the details.