Introduction

Stablecoins are instrumental in decentralized finance applications on the blockchain. USDT and USDS which are pegged to a fiat currency are the earliest and most popular stablecoins. Recently, there are a growing number of stablecoins that are algorithmic or crypto collateral-backed. To what extent, these newly emerging stablecoins can compete with the established ones is an important question.

This dashboard focuses on stablecoin popularity on the Algorand blockchain.

First, the popularity of the two stablecoins in terms of holders will be presented. Then, the usage of these stablecoins over time will be depicted. Finally, the distribution of USDC and USDT will be compared with each other.

The number of transactions a day involving USDC and USDT over time

However, the number of holders cannot necessarily indicate the popularity of a stablecoin. One should also consider how stablecoin is used for transactions. The chart below shows how using the two stablecoins for transactions on the Algorand blockchain has been changed over time.

As can be seen the number of transactions used USDC in past couple of months are in general more than USDT.

Results

What’s the number of people who currently hold USDC vs USDT?

At the time of writing the number of wallets holding USDC and USDT, respectively, are 16,683 and 18,165. As can be seen, USDT holders are more than USDC holders. We can say USDT is more popular on Algorand blockchain than USDC in terms of the number of wallets that hold them at a snapshot on 2022-2-11.

Below we can also see changes over time in the volume of transactions. In terms of volume of transactions, USDC is clearly more popular than USDT on Algorand blockchain.

The distribution of holders

The tables below lists the top 10 wallets in terms of holding USDC and USDT. As can be seen there are two giant wallets holding USDT and USDC. These two wallets holds almost 99 percent of all assets on Algorand blockchain. Excluding those two wallets from analysis gives us clear picture on distribution of stablecoins among Algorand wallets.

The below charts show the distribution of each of USDC nd USDT stablecoins among wallets on Algorand.

The giant wallets have been excluded. The graphs show that the distributions follow a power law. However, in the logarithmic scale, the sharper slope in USDC graph reveals that fewer wallets hold big amounts compared to USDT.

We can dive into this by looking at a different sectors of wallets.

Summary of findings

The aim of this dashboard was to take a look at two of the biggest stable coins on Algorand: USDC and USDT.

First, we investigated the number of people who currently hold USDC vs USDT were shown. The data showed that 16,683 and 18,165 wallets hold USDC and USDT respectively.

• there are more USDT holder than USDC holder, regardless of amount.

Second, we presented a time series chart counting the number and volume of transactions a day for each stablecoin.

• the number of transactions for USDC has recently exceeded the number of transactions for USDT.
• the volume of transactions for USDC is significantly higher than the volume of transactions for USDT.

Finally, we depicted one chart for each stablecoin visualizing the current distribution of holders.

• the data show that USDC has more fair distribution rather than USDT.

• table below show the percentage of different groups of wallets in each stablecoin:

    	Top 100	Top 50	Top 10
    USDC	98,6%	95,8%	77,3%
    USDT	99,6%	99,8%	95,0%
  

While top 10 biggest wallet holding USDT own 95% of whole USDTs on Algorand, the same group own only 77,3% of whole USDC.

The better distribution of USDC may result from practical use of USDC on Algorand. USDC can be used for different purposes rather holding. The volume of transactions presented above supports this hypothesis. Also it is plausible that USDT is still are used and held by bigger institutions. However, USDC has been adopted by more ordinary people.

The below donut charts show the percentage of each stablecoins held by the top 10, 50, and 100 wallets on Algorand. These donut charts similarly show biggest holders of USDC have a smaller share of the whole USDC compared with their USDT counterparts.