The global stablecoin market capitalization crossed $340 billion this week, up from $324 billion at the start of April and $186 billion at the start of 2025. Tether's USDT accounts for $238 billion (70% market share), Circle's USDC for $76 billion (22%), and the remaining $26 billion is split across Ethena USDe, PayPal PYUSD, and dollar-pegged tokens issued by Maker, Frax, First Digital and others.
Tether's reserve attestation, published Monday, reports U.S. Treasury bills and money-market-fund holdings of $202 billion, gold reserves of $13.7 billion, and BTC holdings of $9.1 billion. The Treasury holdings figure makes Tether the 17th-largest holder of U.S. Treasuries — surpassing Mexico, Norway and the United Arab Emirates. The Q1 attestation reported $4.6 billion of net profit, virtually all attributable to T-bill yield.
Settlement Volume Beats Visa
Stablecoin settlement volume reached $14.2 trillion in 2025 and is on pace to clear $22 trillion in 2026. By comparison, Visa processed $13.8 trillion in 2025 across all card products globally. Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Base and Arbitrum collectively account for 88% of stablecoin transfer volume. Roughly 38% of stablecoin flows in Q1 2026 originated from non-human counterparties — automated market-makers, MEV bots, and AI-agent wallets, according to Visa's onchain analytics dashboard.
On the consumer side, stablecoin payment integrations have proliferated. Walmart, Amazon, Stripe, Block (SQ) and Shopify (SHOP) have all enabled stablecoin checkout in select markets. Anthropic, Replicate and Together AI have launched stablecoin billing rails for AI compute. Tether reported $324 billion of point-of-sale settlement volume across its Tether Mobile partnerships in Q1.
GENIUS Act on the Doorstep
The Senate floor vote on the GENIUS Act is scheduled for May 14. The bill would require 1:1 reserves in U.S. Treasuries or qualifying short-duration assets, mandate monthly attestation by a registered audit firm, create a federal payment-stablecoin charter, and codify pass-through deposit insurance for charter holders. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has stated that