Astar Study Finds $21.5 Billion in Stablecoins Outside Tracked Yield Products

Astar's Oct. 27 study of Ethereum and Base wallets found $21.5 billion in stablecoins outside the yield products it tracked, showing how much of the sampled value sat in ordinary balances.

The snapshot covered about 91,000 wallet addresses holding between $50,000 and $2 million in combined stablecoin assets. Together, they held $23.4 billion. The snapshot was taken Oct. 16 at 2:12 a.m. ET (06:12 UTC).

Ordinary stablecoins, including Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC) and Dai (DAI), accounted for $21.5 billion, or about 92% of the sampled value. The tracked yield positions included lending positions, vault shares, savings products and tokenized U.S. Treasury products. Only 8.2% of the wallets held at least one of those positions. The $21.5 billion was roughly one-seventh of the about $149 billion in USD stablecoins on Ethereum and Base.

The share of wallets with a tracked yield position varied by size: 7.5% among those holding $50,000 to $250,000 and 10.1% among those holding $250,000 to $2 million. About 25,000 wallets in the larger range held $16.2 billion; roughly 66,000 in the smaller range held $7.2 billion.

Ordinary stablecoin balances had no change of at least $1 over 90 days in 44% of the wallets, which held about $10.4 billion in that category. Over 180 days, the figures were 33% of wallets and $7.8 billion. A withdrawal followed by a later deposit counted as a change.

The figures count wallet addresses, not individual people: one person may control multiple wallets, and some wallets may be shared. The analysis excluded smart contracts, exchanges, bridges and wallets labeled as institutional. Some entities may be unlabeled, and some yield positions may be missing, making the measured share outside tracked yield products an upper bound.

“Idle” in the study means ordinary stablecoins outside the yield products it tracked. That label does not show whether funds earned returns elsewhere or why holders kept them in that form. The dated wallet analysis adds detail to TokenPost’s earlier discussion of idle stablecoin capital.