Inside the Stablecoins sector, 28 October 2026

Sector Composition and Concentration

As of 28 October 2026, the stablecoin sector covered by this dataset spans 84 constituents with an aggregate market capitalisation of $296.5 billion. Concentration is pronounced: the two largest members alone, Tether ($181.6 billion) and USDC ($71.1 billion), account for the substantial majority of that total. The fifteen members listed in the data range from Tether's $181.6 billion down to Open USD's $827.4 million, a ratio of more than 200-to-one between the largest and the fifteenth-largest constituent. The remaining 69 tracked constituents are not individually itemised here, but their combined weight relative to the two leaders is implied to be modest.

Fee Stream Availability

Of the fifteen named constituents, only one — Ethena USDe — carries a measurable annualised fee figure, reported as $0.122 (annualized from the trailing 30 days to 28 October 2026). The remaining fourteen members carry a null fee value. This does not necessarily mean those protocols generate no revenue; it may reflect data unavailability, structural differences in how fees are recognised, or designs in which no explicit on-chain fee is captured by this methodology. Readers should treat the absence of a fee figure as a data gap rather than a confirmed zero.

Distance from All-Time Highs

The spread of the percent below all-time high figures across the fifteen listed members is wide. USDGO sits closest to its all-time high at –0.24%, followed by BFUSD at –0.82% and United Stables at –0.87%. At the other extreme, Global Dollar is –39.58% below its all-time high, and Tether is –24.51% below its own peak. For assets whose design intent is price stability at a fixed peg, a large distance from an all-time high in market-cap terms reflects contraction in circulating supply rather than price depreciation in the conventional sense — a distinction the raw percentage does not itself convey.

What the Sector Label Does and Does Not Tell Readers

The label stablecoins groups instruments that differ materially in their stabilisation mechanisms, collateral structures, and redemption frameworks. Fiat-backed models, crypto-overcollateralised models, algorithmic designs, and yield-bearing synthetic constructions are all potentially present within the same 84-constituent universe. A sector-level market cap aggregates these into a single number, which is useful for gauging aggregate scale but obscures the distinct risk profiles, counterparty dependencies, and regulatory treatments that apply to each sub-type. The trailing 7-day returns reported here range from –7.34% (Open USD) to +3.49% (Falcon USD), a spread that itself signals the constituents are not functionally interchangeable. Readers interpreting sector-level figures should bear in mind that constituent heterogeneity limits the analytical conclusions that can be drawn from aggregate statistics alone.