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USDC vs USDT on Ethereum: What 30 Days of Transfers Show

USDT had twice as many active senders on Ethereum over 30 days, but USDC moved almost twice the money. A lending protocol, Morpho, was on one side of 40% of USDC's volume. Measured transfer by transfer.

By Gaurav Agrawal · Blockchain Intelligence

Cover Image for USDC vs USDT on Ethereum: What 30 Days of Transfers Show

USDT and USDC are the two largest dollar stablecoins, and on Ethereum they are used in different ways. We counted every successful USDT and USDC transfer on Ethereum over 30 days, from 15 September to 14 October 2026, with the Bitquery MCP server. All times are UTC.

Key findings

USDT has more users. 3.05 million addresses sent at least $1 of USDT in the 30 days, twice the 1.49 million that sent USDC.
USDC moves more money. Its transfers added up to $939 billion, against $490 billion for USDT.
A lending protocol drives much of that gap. Morpho Blue sent or received 40% of all USDC volume and 26% of USDT volume. Leave it out and the totals are $564 billion and $365 billion.
Spam is a large share of transfers. 27% of USDC transfers and 31% of USDT transfers were for zero or for less than $1, the pattern of address-poisoning scams.

Thirty days side by side

On Ethereum, 15 Sep to 14 Oct 2026	USDC	USDT
Successful transfers	18.8 million	20.7 million
Total amount moved	$939 billion	$490 billion
Addresses that sent $1 or more	1.49 million	3.05 million
Addresses that received $1 or more	1.50 million	2.23 million
Daily senders of $1 or more	72,800 to 112,500	111,600 to 280,600
Transfers of zero	1.67 million	2.46 million
Transfers above zero but under $1	3.44 million	3.93 million

Both tokens are pegged to the dollar, so one token is counted as $1.

The two columns describe different crowds. USDT reaches far more wallets: on its busiest day, 22 September, 280,551 addresses sent at least $1 of it, while USDC never passed 112,489. USDC moves bigger sums between fewer addresses.

Where the volume comes from

A total of $939 billion in a month sounds like a lot of payments. Much of it is the same money moving in loops between contracts. The largest sender of both tokens was Morpho Blue, a lending protocol.

Largest sender, 30 days	USDC	USDT
Morpho Blue sent	$187.7 billion	$62.5 billion
Volume with Morpho on either side	$375.4 billion	$124.9 billion
Share of all volume	40%	26%

Morpho sent $187.7 billion of USDC and received almost exactly the same amount back. Loans that are repaid, and flash loans that borrow and repay inside one transaction, produce that pattern, and every round trip is counted twice. Among the other top-ten senders are the hot wallets of Binance and Coinbase, Circle's own wallet, Uniswap's v4 pool contract, Aave's USDT pool and two wallets labelled as MEV bots. Several of the top ten carry no label at all.

So "which stablecoin is used more?" has two answers. By wallets, USDT. By dollars moved on Ethereum, USDC, though much of the lead comes from lending loops rather than people paying each other.

Weekday and weekend

Both tokens follow a working week. USDC volume fell to $14.4 billion on Sunday 4 October and USDT to $4.2 billion on Sunday 27 September, against $30 billion to $40 billion on a normal weekday. The biggest days were 17 September for Circle's coin, at $62.4 billion, and 7 October for USDT, at $57.5 billion. Daily sender counts drop at weekends too: from a median of about 103,000 on weekdays to 76,000 for USDC, and from about 166,000 to 116,000 for USDT.

Spam transfers

About 1.7 million USDC transfers and 2.5 million USDT transfers in the 30 days moved nothing at all. Another 3.4 million and 3.9 million moved less than $1. Most of these come from address poisoning: a scammer sends a tiny or zero transfer from an address that looks like one the victim uses, hoping the victim copies it next time. That is why the table counts only senders of $1 or more. Raw transfer and wallet counts for either token are inflated by this spam.

Issuance on Ethereum

Circle mints USDC as a transfer from the zero address and burns it as a transfer back. Over the 30 days, $24.3 billion was minted on Ethereum and $26.8 billion burned, so the supply on Ethereum shrank by about $2.5 billion. USDT does not show up the same way: Tether issues and redeems through separate contract events rather than transfers from the zero address, so its issuance is not in these transfer totals.

Measure it yourself

Every figure above came from asking an AI client connected to the Bitquery MCP server. Connect it with one URL, https://mcp.bitquery.io, and see the setup guide for each client. Prompts to start with:

Compare USDC and USDT on Ethereum over the last 30 days: number of
successful transfers, total amount, and how many addresses sent at
least $1 of each.

Who were the ten largest senders of each token in that period?
Label each address.

How many USDT transfers in that period were for zero, and how many
were for less than $1?

The AI answers these with eth_transfers_raw_sql, which reads Bitquery's Ethereum transfer tables, and labels_for_addresses, which names exchanges, protocols and bots. Plans are on our pricing page.

For holder counts and top holders in your own code, the Token Holders API in Bitquery's GraphQL API returns the holder count, the largest holders and their balances for any ERC-20 token.

AI analytics

Ask on-chain questions in plain English

Connect the Bitquery MCP server to Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT and ask about any token's transfers, holders and trades. The agent runs the queries, labels the addresses and shows the rows behind every number.

Ethereum, Tron, Solana and moretransfers and holdersaddress labelsplain English

See the MCP server →

Method

We counted transfers of the USDT contract 0xdAC17F958D2ee523a2206206994597C13D831ec7 and the USDC contract 0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48 on Ethereum mainnet only, from 15 September 2026 00:00 to 15 October 2026 00:00 UTC, keeping successful transfers. Both tokens also run on other chains, Tron above all for USDT, so these figures are not totals for either token. A transfer that passes through several contracts in one transaction is counted at each step, which inflates volume for both tokens. Labels come from Bitquery's address-label directory and reflect what was known on 16 October 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Which is used more, USDC or USDT?

On Ethereum, more wallets use USDT: 3.05 million addresses sent at least $1 of it in our 30-day window, against 1.49 million for USDC. USDC moved more money, $939 billion against $490 billion, though 40% of that volume involved the lending protocol Morpho Blue.

Why is USDC's transfer volume so high?

Lending and trading contracts move the same dollars many times. Morpho Blue alone sent about $188 billion of the token in 30 days and received about the same amount back, as loans went out and were repaid.

Why do so many stablecoin transfers have zero value?

Most are address-poisoning spam. A scammer sends a zero or tiny transfer from a look-alike address so that it appears in the victim's history. 27% of USDC transfers and 31% of USDT transfers on Ethereum in our window were for zero or under $1.

Does this cover USDT on Tron?

No. These figures are for Ethereum only. About half of all USDT circulates on Tron, so USDT's total activity is far larger than its Ethereum figures. The same MCP prompts work on Tron by naming that chain.