The supply of stablecoins reached nearly $300 billion at the beginning of the year, but growth has almost stopped. The October crash of the cryptocurrency market is still having an effect, analysts from ARK Invest explained.

In mid-October of last year, the supply of stablecoins was at $293 billion, the same as on January 1. As of January 28, it has even slightly decreased (to $290 billion). At the beginning of 2025, the total volume of circulating stablecoins was $200 billion, according to a recent report by ARK Invest.

The USDe stablecoin from the Ethena project was the most affected by the October market crash, with its supply plummeting by about 58% from a peak of $14.3 billion to $6 billion by the end of the year. ARK Invest attributes this to the liquidation of a large number of traders' positions with this coin on October 10 and the exchange rate deviation on Binance.

The majority of transactions with stablecoins were on the Ethereum network — about 58%. The leader among tokens was USDC from Circle, accounting for over 60% of the total transaction volume with stablecoins. Meanwhile, USDC holds only a quarter of the total supply of all stable tokens on the market, trailing behind Tether's USDT.

Analysts also point to a sharp increase in the popularity of the PYUSD coin from the PayPal payment service. People have started to use this token more frequently for payments: in the fourth quarter, the token's turnover speed increased 2.5 times compared to the previous three months. No other stablecoin has shown such figures.

The market for tokenized assets grew by approximately 15%, reaching $19 billion. Moreover, the volume of tokenized goods, primarily gold, surged by 64% to $3.5 billion, mainly due to the rising cost of the precious metal, experts from ARK Invest reported.

The volume of spot trading on decentralized exchanges (DEX) from October to December amounted to about $1.1 trillion. This marks the fifth consecutive quarter where the figure exceeds $1 trillion, the authors of the study noted. Nearly 55% of the activity was attributed to stablecoins. The fastest-growing category on DEX was the trading of tokenized assets, which saw a volume increase of approximately 202% compared to the previous quarter. The trading volumes of meme coins and liquid staking tokens decreased by about 37%. At the same time, ARK Invest noted that total revenue from fees, operations, and locked assets on DeFi platforms decreased by 27% over the quarter, amounting to $473 million. Experts linked this to the October decline in the cryptocurrency market.

In the last week of January, the market capitalization of stablecoins on the Ethereum network fell by $7 billion. Experts from the on-chain platform CryptoQuant compared the situation to 2021 when the market was entering a bearish phase.