USDC USDC

-0.01% $1.00

SOL Solana

+1.05% $83.96

Every stablecoin dollar on Solana turns over 6x faster than on Ethereum

By TheStreet Roundtable

16 days ago

ETH

SOL

USDC

DEX

Send

Solana has overtaken Ethereum in adjusted stablecoin volume for the second time in three months, and this time the lead appears to be holding.

Data from Allium Labs, compiled by on-chain analyst Surf Query, shows Solana captured 32.6% of weekly adjusted USD-based stablecoin volume for the two-week stretch ending April 12, ahead of Ethereum at 27.8%, Tron at 18.5%, Base at 14.6%, and BNB Chain at 3.3%.

The data excludes wash trading and internal centralized exchange flows, stripping out the artificial activity that inflates raw volume figures on many chains.

What does "adjusted volume" mean? Raw stablecoin volume counts every transaction, including bots trading with themselves (wash trading) and exchanges shuffling funds between their own wallets (internal CEX flows).

Adjusted volume filters all of that out to show only real transfers between real users. It's a cleaner measure of actual economic activity on a blockchain.

The numbers behind the flip

Solana first claimed the top spot in February, when adjusted stablecoin volume on the network hit roughly $650 billion for the month, the highest ever recorded on any single blockchain, ahead of Ethereum's $551 billion.

Total stablecoin volume across all chains approached $1.8 trillion that month. Solana held 36% market share versus Ethereum's 30%, according to data cited by Grayscale Research.

That February spike initially looked like it could be a one-off. But the latest Allium data shows Solana has reclaimed the lead and held it for two consecutive weeks, reinforcing what appears to be a structural shift.

Why does this matter? Stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to the U.S. dollar — are the base layer of crypto finance.

They're used for trading, lending, payments, and moving money between platforms. Whichever blockchain handles the most stablecoin traffic is essentially becoming the default payment rail for crypto.

That was always Ethereum. Now it's Solana.

$16.3 billion in supply and growing faster than any top chain

According to DefiLlama's live tracker, total stablecoin supply on Solana has hit a record $16.288 billion, up $1.6 billion (+10.87%) in the past seven days alone — the fastest growth rate of any top-10 chain. For context, Ethereum grew just 0.63% in the same period, and Tron declined 0.23%.

That puts Solana in third place globally by stablecoin supply, behind only Ethereum ($166.1B) and Tron ($86.5B), per DefiLlama's chain-by-chain tracker. The total stablecoin market now stands at $320.1 billion.

But here's the key ratio: Solana holds just 5.1% of global stablecoin supply but commands 32.6% of adjusted transfer volume. Every dollar of stablecoins on Solana is turning over roughly six times faster than on Ethereum.

Think of it like this. Ethereum is a warehouse with $166 billion of cash sitting in it, but relatively little of it moves on any given day.

Solana has a much smaller pile, $16 billion but it's constantly in motion. The money on Solana is working harder.

What's actually on Solana

USDC alone grew 12.46% in the past week and Circle minted $3.25 billion in USDC on Solana in a single week between March 31 and April 6, the largest weekly issuance on the network in 2026.

Total USDC supply on Solana has now crossed $10.5 billion, up from roughly $5 billion at the start of 2025.

The presence of BlackRock's BUIDL ($526M), PayPal's PYUSD ($738M), and World Liberty Financial's USD1 ($796M) signals that Solana's stablecoin ecosystem has moved well beyond retail.

BUIDL is BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, essentially a U.S. Treasury-backed token that lives on blockchain rails.

The fact that half a billion dollars of it sits on Solana means the world's largest asset manager is treating this chain as real financial infrastructure, not a toy.

Circle is fueling the supply side

The new mints are tracking net expansion rather than re-issuance, suggesting fresh demand from exchanges, DeFi protocols, and payment platforms building on the network.

USDC transfer volume on Solana first surpassed Ethereum on December 29, 2025, and has remained ahead since.

Global Dollar (USDG), backed by Paxos, has quietly climbed to $1.265 billion on Solana with a 24.23% jump in the past week — making it the third-largest stablecoin on the chain.

When Circle mints new USDC, it can mean two things, someone deposited fresh dollars and got new tokens (expansion), or old tokens were burned on one chain and re-minted on another (re-issuance).

Net expansion means new money is actually entering the system — not just moving between blockchains.

On-chain data tells the adoption story in granular detail. Dune Analytics' Solana Stablecoin Adoption dashboard, built by @overdose_btc, tracks weekly stablecoin users on Solana by token type going back to October 2020.

As of early 2026, USDC accounts for roughly 75–80% of all weekly stablecoin wallet activity on Solana, with USDT taking 15–20%, and newer entrants PYUSD and USDS splitting the remainder.

PYUSD — PayPal's stablecoin — ramped from near-zero to 20,000–25,000 weekly active users between its April 2024 Solana launch and late 2025 before stabilizing.

DEX volume and network activity confirm the trend

It's not just stablecoins. Solana leads all blockchains in decentralized exchange volume, with roughly $1.3 billion in daily DEX trading as of late March — compared to Ethereum's $765 million.

The network processed 10.1 billion transactions in Q1 2026, setting a new quarterly record. Solana's TVL hit an all-time high of 80 million SOL in Q1 — even as SOL's price fell 57%, suggesting organic protocol growth rather than price-driven inflation.

Total value locked is the amount of crypto deposited into a blockchain's DeFi protocols (lending, trading, staking). It's the standard measure of how much capital is actively being used on a network.

The fact that Solana's TVL hit a record high in SOL terms while the price crashed means more people are using the chain, not fewer — they're just using it with cheaper coins.

The gap that remains

Solana still trails Ethereum significantly in total value locked — roughly $7 billion vs. $85 billion. And Ethereum still dominates total stablecoin supply at $166 billion (52.86%).

But the chain-by-chain shift is clear. Base ($4.8B, USDC-dominant at 90%), Hyperliquid L1 ($5.3B, USDC at 93%), and Arbitrum ($3.9B, USDC at 58%) are all growing — each with USDC as the dominant stablecoin, a structural tailwind for Circle over Tether.

Solana's stablecoin dominance is being driven by sub-cent transaction fees and sub-second finality.

For high-frequency, lower-value transfers — payments, remittances, DeFi swaps, Ethereum's gas costs remain a barrier that Layer 2s have only partially solved.