# USDT Growth on Ethereum Was Not Matched by Smart-Contract Share Increase

By Enna Lee

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/investing/25037
Published: 2026-09-28T17:35:34.000Z
Updated: 2026-09-28T17:35:34.000Z
Section: Investing

> Ethereum’s smart-contract share of Tether’s USDt holdings fell to 10%–15% after late 2024, while the stablecoin’s supply series surpassed $180 billion in early 2026.

Tether’s USDt (USDT) supply expanded sharply on Ethereum through late 2024, but the share held by smart-contract accounts did not show a sustained increase alongside it, limiting what issuance growth alone can say about decentralized finance activity.

Smart-contract accounts held more than 20% of Ethereum’s USDT during part of the historical series. That share later settled at about 15% to 20% through late 2024 before declining to 10% to 15%.

“Since late 2024, the share of USDT smart contract holdings on Ethereum has declined to 10-15%,” wrote Timothy Aerts, Ronald Heijmans, Jan Paulick and Violeta Vuletic.

The USDT supply series exceeded $180 billion in early 2026. On Tron, smart-contract accounts held about 1% of USDT for most of the period studied.

The figures do not establish that the absolute amount of USDT held in Ethereum smart contracts declined. A lower percentage can occur if total issuance grows faster than the balance held in those accounts.

Smart-contract balances may reflect lending, staking and liquidity provision, but they can also represent bridges, wrappers or custody arrangements. Externally owned accounts, which are generally controlled through private keys, do not show whether USDT is being used for payments, remittances, savings or exchange custody.

The analysis measured where USDT was held on Ethereum and Tron rather than identifying the precise purpose of each balance. Its findings therefore provide an imperfect measure of economic activity and do not represent a direct measure of total DeFi use.

“Our findings suggest that on-chain indicators should be treated as noisy approximations rather than direct measures of economic activity,” the authors wrote.

The researchers examined transfer-event logs from Ethereum and Tron, classified addresses as externally owned or smart-contract accounts, and cross-checked supply through mint, burn and blacklist-destruction events. The dataset covered about 100 billion records across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron.

The analysis also identified about 7,000 token contracts using the USDT symbol, excluding Tether’s genuine USDT contract from that sample.