Stablecoin supply on Stellar has risen sharply over the past week, even as capital deployed in its DeFi protocols has cooled from a record high. The stablecoin market cap on @StellarOrg now s
Stablecoin supply on Stellar has risen sharply over the past week, even as capital deployed in its DeFi protocols has cooled from a record high.
The stablecoin market cap on @StellarOrg now stands at more than $541 million, up 28% on the week. Over the same period, stellar:native total value locked (TVL) has fallen by more than $42 million since it reached a new all-time high on October 5.
The two measures track different things. Stablecoin market cap shows how much dollar-pegged liquidity is issued on the network, while TVL captures the value deposited in DeFi applications such as lending markets and decentralized exchanges. A rise in one does not guarantee a rise in the other, and the divergence suggests new stablecoins are arriving faster than they are being put to work in protocols.
TVL has been volatile in recent months. DailyCoin reported that Stellar's DeFi TVL fell from an all-time high of about $270 million on August 22, 2026 to around $98 million by August 27, which it attributed to an exploit on a Comet AMM liquidity pool backing the Blend protocol. DailyCoin covered the episode in detail. TVL later recovered to new highs. COINOTAG reported a record of roughly $273 million in early October, up from about $265 million a week earlier.
The latest pullback is therefore a retreat from a recent peak rather than a break in the longer uptrend, though the figures cited here come from different trackers and dates, and DefiLlama data can be revised.
Stellar has positioned itself as a payments and asset-issuance network. According to rwa.xyz data cited by 24/7 Wall St. on October 17, the network manages about $3.6 billion in tokenized real-world assets excluding stablecoins, ranking fourth among all networks. The same report put Stellar's stablecoin holdings at $535 million on that dataset, far below Ethereum's $147.1 billion, which shows how much room there is to grow.
USDC is the largest stablecoin on the network. Cryptonews, citing DefiLlama data in April, reported that USDC held roughly 66% dominance of Stellar's stablecoin market cap at that time, when the total stood at about $404 million. The $541 million level now reported is well above that figure.
Stablecoin inflows are often read as a sign of growing demand for payments and settlement on a chain, but they do not directly determine the price of $XLM. Traders will be watching whether the new supply translates into higher TVL and on-chain activity in the coming weeks.
DailyCoin: Stellar's TVL peak unloads 60%
