Stablecoin Titans Rake in Nearly $5B on Ethereum in 2025

Forget trading desks—the real money machine in crypto just printed its annual report.

The Fee Factory

While retail traders chase memecoins, the infrastructure players quietly collect tolls. On Ethereum alone, the issuers behind major dollar-pegged tokens generated revenue streams that would make traditional payment processors blush. We're talking billions—nearly five of them—extracted from the simple act of moving digital dollars.

Yield in Plain Sight

The model is brutally elegant. Issue a token backed by ultra-safe, yield-generating assets like Treasury bills. Every unit in circulation becomes a tiny, perpetual revenue stream. Scale to tens of billions in supply, and the math does the rest. It's the kind of 'boring finance' that built empires, now running on decentralized rails.

The Silent Shift

This isn't just profit; it's power. That $5 billion represents capital that isn't sitting in a bank vault. It's proof that the most valuable real estate in finance is no longer a street address in Manhattan—it's a smart contract address on-chain. The revenue fuels everything from protocol development to political lobbying, cementing these issuers as permanent fixtures.

A cynical take? The old guard spent centuries building banks to profit from money. The new guard coded a faster vault and kept the profits for themselves. Nearly $5 billion in a single year suggests the vault door is wide open.

Ethereum stablecoin volume doubles to an ATH of $8T 

Token Terminal previously reported that Ethereum stablecoin transfers in the fourth quarter of 2025 surpassed $8 trillion, recording a new all-time high. The milestone is nearly double the Ethereum stablecoin volume in Q2, which was approximately $4 trillion. Stablecoin issuance on Ethereum in 2025 also increased from $127 billion to $181 billion by the end of the year, representing a 43% rise. 

The number of daily unique addresses active as senders or receivers on the Ethereum network surpassed a million in late December. The network remains the primary stablecoin settlement layer, which accounts for nearly 65% (~$19B) of the market share. 

That market dominance surges to over 70% when EVM and L2 networks are included. Ethereum now holds a 57% market share of all issued stablecoins, with USDT leading in issuance at $187 billion. The issued USDT also accounted for 60% of the entire stablecoin market, and over 50% of that on Ethereum.

More Token Terminal data also reveals that about 50% of stablecoins deployed in Europe are on Ethereum. The remainder is distributed across Solana, Arbitrum, Base, and Polygon. Among the top Euro-backed stablecoins on Ethereum are Circle’s Euro Coin (EUROC), STASIS EURO (EURS), and  Société Générale’s EUR CoinVertible (EURCV).

Tether tops the list of stablecoin issuers by revenue in 2025

Source: Token Terminal. Weekly revenue by project for the past 365 days.

Token Terminal data revealed that stablecoin issuer Tether generated over $5 billion in 2025. The stablecoin issuer has raked in $421.4 million in the past 30 days, representing a decline of approximately 5.5%. 

Tether generated a revenue of $104.35 million in the week from December 1, 2025, which dropped slightly to $100.51 million during the week from December 8. The revenue plummeted further to $97.64 million in the week from December 15, remained the same in the week from December 22, but ROSE slightly to $97.72 million in the week from December 29, 2025, to January 1, 2026.

Meanwhile, Circle’s revenue reached $2.4 billion in 2025 and managed to raise $201.4 million in the past 30 days, representing a 2.3% decrease. The stablecoin issuer’s revenue was $50.15 million in the week from December 1, 2025, before dropping to $49.13 million in the week from December 8. Circle’s revenue declined further in the week from December 15 to $48.31 million, but rose slightly to $48.81 million in the week from December 22. The revenue plummeted by at least $2 million in the final week of December 2025, clocking $46.69 million. 

Another stablecoin issuer, SKY, generated $363.9 million in revenue in 2025. SKY has generated $22.5 million in revenue over the past 30 days, representing a 33.1% decline. SKY’s revenue in December 2025 also dropped sharply from $21.56 million in the week from December 1 to just $1.16 million in the week from December 8. 

SKY’s revenue dropped further to a little under a billion (~$996.67M) in the week from December 15, and even lower to $929.83 million in the week from December 22. The revenue jumped to $19.06 million in the final week of December, ending January 1, 2026.

The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.