Stablecoin Activity Surges Past $1T as Circulation Intensity Soars

The stablecoin market has seen significant growth since January 2024, with the supply of dollar-linked tokens roughly doubling and entity-adjusted transaction volume increasing four to five times over. According to Coinbase Institutional, this represents a wide gap between the amount of dollar liquidity held onchain and the volume of activity that liquidity supports.

Market capitalization, which captures available liquidity, reserve demand, and issuer scale, has increased significantly, but transaction throughput, which records how intensively those tokens move through exchanges, payment systems, treasury accounts, and settlement workflows, has grown much faster. This shift towards a more intense circulation of stablecoins reflects their increasing use as settlement instruments in financial markets.

Visa's Economic Empowerment Institute calculated total stablecoin velocity at 13.56 during the fourth quarter of 2025, meaning that on average, each token changed hands over 13 times during that period. In comparison, US M1 velocity stood at 1.65 over the same period.