Polygon has 8 million USDT0 holders. Half hold less than a cent
A holder count is the easiest number in crypto to quote and the hardest to read. We went through all 8 million behind this one to see who they are and what they hold.
- 8.05M
- 48%
- 1.1M
- 58%
- −42%
01 · The claimWhat 8 million USDT0 holders means
Polygon posted a chart on 6 October. It shows more than 8.1 million wallets holding USDT0, Tether's dollar stablecoin, on Polygon. That is more than any other chain in the chart. Polygon called it three years of growth.
Token Terminal, a crypto data site, made the chart. USDT0 is the version of USDT built to move between blockchains, and on Polygon it isn't a new coin. For five years Polygon carried bridged USDT, a copy brought over from Ethereum through Polygon's bridge. Last August that token was upgraded in place, at the same contract address. Every old holder became a USDT0 holder overnight.
So who are the 8 million? In charts like this one, a holder is any wallet with a balance above zero, however small. Bitquery indexes the Polygon chain, the same data behind our look at how much of Polygon is Polymarket. We worked out what every wallet holds, then checked thousands of them against the chain.
The count is close. About 8.05 million wallets hold some of the token. Most of them hold almost nothing, though, and many are fake addresses set up by scammers. And over the past year, the wallets with real money in them have shrunk.
02 · BalancesHalf hold less than a cent
We sorted every holder into seven groups, by what it holds and how the money got there.
Half of all holders have less than one cent. Fewer than one in ten hold $10 or more.
The biggest group is crumbs. Nine in ten of these wallets once received a dollar or more, then sent it on and left a sliver behind. That sliver still counts.
Then there is the small change nobody touched. About a million more got between a cent and a dollar and never moved it. Many of those came from a handful of senders that sprayed small sums across huge lists of wallets, airdrop-style.
Most of these wallets are asleep. 65% of all holders haven't sent or received the token in a year.
03 · Fake addressesAbout 1.1 million holders are scam look-alikes
The fastest-growing group is the strangest. These wallets received less than a cent, then sent an even smaller amount to someone else. That is the mark of address poisoning, a scam that plants a fake address in your transaction history.
It's a cousin of the dusting attack, where scammers send tiny amounts, called dust, to thousands of wallets at once. Here the dust comes from an address built to look like one you already use.
Wallet addresses are long, and most people check only the first and last few characters. So a bot watches for payments. When it sees one, it picks an address that starts and ends like the one you just paid, then pings you a tiny amount from it. Next time you copy an address from your history, you might grab the fake one. Your money goes to the scammer. The fix is boring. Check the whole address, or pay from a saved contact.
Here is a real one from September.
The look-alike kept a fraction of a cent, so it now shows up as a USDT0 holder. One scam funding address alone has been the first sender to 340,671 wallets like it since February.
Could these matches be luck? We took random samples of wallets with this pattern. Most had copied the start and end of a real contact of the wallet they pinged. When we flipped each address around, a test where only luck can match, none did.
That puts about 1.1 million look-alikes among the holders, about 13% of all of them.
04 · After the upgradeMore holders, less money
Since the upgrade last August, the holder count has grown by about 1.7 million. More than half of that rise fits the poisoning pattern, and crumbs make up most of the rest.
Before USDT0, real balances grew along with the count, and wallets holding $10 or more more than doubled between late 2023 and the upgrade while the supply on Polygon tripled. Since then they have dropped.
The group holding between $10 and $1,000 lost about half a million wallets in just over a year.
The money tells the same story. The supply of the token on Polygon fell by 41%, and wallets holding $10 or more fell by 42%. Anyone can check the supply on the token itself, and Polygon's transfer history is sold as files in our Data Store.
| Before and after the upgrade | 27 Aug 2025 → 7 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|
| Holders, by our count | 6,383,953 → 8,098,017 |
| Share of the net rise with the poisoning pattern | 58% |
| Wallets holding $10 or more, checked against the chain | about 1,240,000 → 720,000 |
| Supply on Polygon | $1.35 billion → $798 million |
| Holders three years ago, October 2023 | 2.55 million |
| Rise in holders before the upgrade / after it | 3.8 million / 1.7 million |
| Today's holders who first got the old bridged USDT | 67% |
So the three years of growth in Polygon's chart are mostly the old token's story. Two thirds of today's holders first got it as bridged USDT, before it had the USDT0 name.
05 · Real holdersWhere the real holders come from
If most holders are dust, who are the real ones? For each holder, we looked up the first wallet that sent it the token. Exchanges are the biggest source we can name. Among holders with at least a dollar, 30% got their first USDT0 straight from an exchange, a withdrawal from Binance, OKX, Bybit and the like.
No other company we could label brought in as many holders as Binance's three wallets. Scam dust senders and mass payout senders sit right next to the exchanges in that ranking, though.
The money itself sits with a few whales. The ten largest holders have 29% of the supply. Half of them are exchange wallets, and three carry no label at all. Our token holder API lists holders for any token, and the Bitquery MCP can follow where a wallet's money went.
| Largest holders, 7 October 2026 | Balance |
|---|---|
| Kraken hot wallet 0xbde2aa…be5f39 | $53,551,380 |
| Hyperlane-type bridge contract 0x8932fe…595f71 | $37,965,524 |
| No label 0xc9da44…69817e | $37,803,388 |
| Binance hot wallet 0xe7804c…b6e245 | $26,453,069 |
| No label 0xa4856e…310f10 | $23,848,541 |
| No label 0x824dbf…f345a2 | $14,641,427 |
| Aave v3 aUSDT pool 0x6ab707…490620 | $10,621,372 |
| OKX hot wallet 0x3b5028…6b962b | $9,544,450 |
| Bybit hot wallet 0xa85c29…1be2ce | $8,763,661 |
| Bybit hot wallet 0x134737…be74ec | $8,734,635 |
06 · The answerSo how many people hold USDT0 on Polygon?
Nobody can count people from the chain. One person can run many wallets, and one exchange wallet can hold money for millions of customers.
Counting wallets, Polygon's chart is close to right. About 8.05 million addresses hold some of the token. But fewer than one in ten hold $10 or more, and that group has shrunk since last August while scam addresses piled up.
Holder counts are easy to pad. We've seen memecoins padding their holder lists with addresses nobody uses, and fake airdrop tokens pushed into wallets by the hundreds of millions. For a stablecoin, watch the supply instead. Dust can't fake it, and it is how we tracked Avalanche's stablecoin slide.
A holder is an address with a balance above zero, not a person. One person or one company can control many addresses.
We added up the token's transfers to get each balance, then checked samples against the balances the token itself reports. Adding up transfers misses a few, so figures for larger wallets, and every figure given as about, come from those checks.
Look-alike wallets are found by a pattern and checked on a random sample. Some wallets that fit the pattern may be something else, and some poisoning wallets fall outside it.
Labels come from Bitquery's address labels and the behaviour of each wallet. Wallets without a label are described, not named.
Dollar figures treat one token as one dollar.
07 · The recordAddresses behind this story
FAQ
How many USDT0 holders does Polygon have?
About 8.05 million addresses held some USDT0 on Polygon in early October. Half of them held less than one cent, and fewer than one in ten held $10 or more.
What is USDT0?
USDT0 is a version of Tether's USDT stablecoin built to move between blockchains, using LayerZero, a cross-chain messaging protocol. On Polygon it replaced the bridged USDT last August at the same contract address, so holders kept their balances.
USDT0 vs USDT: what is the difference on Polygon?
For a holder on Polygon, the balance did not change. The old bridged USDT was upgraded in place to USDT0 and kept its address and its balances. Only the name and the way it moves between chains changed. Wallets did not need to swap anything.
What is the USDT contract address on Polygon?
It is 0xc2132d05d31c914a87c6611c10748aeb04b58e8f. The same address held the bridged USDT until last August and has held USDT0 since the upgrade.
Why do so many wallets hold less than a cent?
Most of them once held more and moved it out, leaving a sliver behind. About 1.1 million are fake addresses made by scammers, which keep a fraction of a cent after each attempt. A wallet with any balance at all counts as a holder.
What is address poisoning?
It is a scam that plants a fake address in your transaction history. The scammer makes an address that starts and ends like one you use, sends you a tiny amount from it, and hopes you copy it the next time you send money. Checking the whole address, or paying a saved contact, avoids it.
How much USDT0 is on Polygon?
About $798 million in early October, down from $1.35 billion on the day of the upgrade last August. That is a fall of 41% in a little over a year, while the number of holders rose by 27%.
This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects analysis of publicly available on-chain data as of the dates indicated. It does not constitute legal, financial, compliance, or investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token or asset.
The findings describe transfers and balances observed in Polygon blockchain data over the period stated, together with the rules we used to sort holders. Attributions come from Bitquery's address labels and on-chain behaviour; they may be incomplete or incorrect and may be revised as more data becomes available. Polygon addresses are pseudonymous, and an unlabelled address is described by its behaviour and attributed to nobody.
References to Polygon, Tether, USDT0, Token Terminal, Binance, OKX, Bybit, Kraken or any other named party describe on-chain records and public statements, and are not statements about any entity's conduct, solvency or intentions. Nothing here asserts that any named party acted unlawfully.
Nothing herein should be relied upon as a definitive determination of fact. Readers should conduct their own independent verification before taking any action. The authors and publisher accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this material. All trademarks and company names are the property of their respective owners.
Reported by Gaurav Agarwal for Bitquery Research, with AI tools; every figure was checked against the raw data.
Check Polygon's numbers yourself
The figures above come from Bitquery's Polygon data, which holds the token's transfers back to its first day in 2020. You can look up any address named here through our API, or follow where a wallet's money went with the Bitquery MCP. The full history of Polygon transfers is also sold as files in the Bitquery Data Store.