Inside the USD Stablecoin sector, 29 August 2026

Sector Composition and Concentration

As of 29 August 2026, the USD Stablecoin sector tracked 55 constituents with a combined market capitalisation of $287.5 billion. Concentration is pronounced: Tether alone accounted for approximately $183.4 billion, representing roughly 63.8% of the sector total. The two largest members — Tether and USDC (at $74.1 billion) — together represented approximately 89.5% of the sector by market cap, leaving the remaining 53 constituents to share the balance. The fifteenth-largest member by market cap in the data supplied, Usual USD, stood at $549.2 million, illustrating a long, thinning tail beneath the top two names.

Fee Stream Availability

The JSON supplies an annualized fee figure — derived from the trailing 30 days to 29 August 2026 — for only one of the fifteen largest members listed: Ethena USDe, at an annualized fee rate of $0.243 (expressed in the units provided). For the remaining fourteen members shown, the fee field is null. This is a material data gap: the absence of a figure does not confirm that no fee activity exists; it indicates only that a measurable or reported fee stream was not available in this dataset for those constituents. Readers drawing cross-member comparisons on economic activity should treat the fee column with that limitation in mind.

Distance from All-Time Highs

The spread of percent below all-time high figures across the fifteen members is wider than the sector label might suggest. At the narrow end, USDGO sits just 0.23% below its all-time high, and United Stables sits 0.82% below its peak. At the wide end, Global Dollar is recorded at 39.55% below its all-time high, and Tether at 24.42% below its own peak. For assets whose design objective is a stable $1.00 peg, a large drawdown from an all-time high can reflect a period of elevated supply that subsequently contracted, a prior de-peg event, or simply a different base date for the high — the metric alone does not disambiguate these explanations.

What the Sector Label Does and Does Not Convey

The label USD Stablecoin communicates a shared reference unit (the US dollar) and a general intent toward price stability, but it does not describe a homogeneous asset class. The constituents in this dataset include fiat-backed, crypto-collateralised, and synthetically constructed instruments. Their collateral structures, redemption mechanisms, counterparty arrangements, and on-chain governance models differ materially. A sector-level aggregate such as the $287.5 billion combined market cap summarises scale but necessarily obscures the structural heterogeneity beneath it. The trailing 7-day return for all but one constituent shown registers at exactly 0.0%, with Usual USD the sole exception at +0.1% over that period — a pattern consistent with peg-targeting design, but not informative about underlying risk differentiation across members.