Stablecoin Issuers Made $5 Billion From Ethereum Last Year

Stablecoin issuers generated approximately $5 billion in revenue from their Ethereum deployments across 2025, according to Token Terminal data, with supply on the network climbing sharply in the second half of the year.

How Stablecoin Issuers Actually Make Money

The mechanism is worth understanding before the numbers. A stablecoin issuer takes in a dollar, issues a dollar-pegged token, and invests the underlying dollar in yield-bearing assets, primarily U.S. Treasury bills. The holder of the stablecoin gets price stability. The issuer keeps the yield. At current Treasury rates, that spread is meaningful.

Token Terminal’s revenue allocation uses a pro rata method. If 70% of an issuer’s total stablecoin supply sits on Ethereum, then 70% of that issuer’s total revenue gets attributed to its Ethereum deployment. So the $5 billion figure is not Ethereum’s revenue. It is the portion of stablecoin issuer revenue that Ethereum’s network can claim credit for enabling.

That distinction matters for how you think about Ethereum’s role in this ecosystem.

What the Chart Shows Quarter by Quarter

Revenue from Ethereum-based stablecoin deployments held roughly flat at around $1.1 billion in Q1 and Q2 2025, then jumped to approximately $1.3 billion in Q3 before edging slightly higher again in Q4. Full year total comes to roughly $5 billion.

The stablecoin supply line tells a more dramatic story. Supply on Ethereum was relatively flat through the first half of the year, then accelerated noticeably in Q3 and Q4, reaching somewhere above $160 billion by year end. Revenue grew, but supply grew faster. That gap suggests yield rates compressed as supply expanded, or that newer supply was concentrated in lower-yield instruments. Either way, the issuers were not extracting proportionally more revenue per dollar of supply deployed as the year progressed.

That is not alarming. It is what happens when a market scales. The per-unit margin compresses as volume expands.

The Competitive Context Nobody Is Saying Out Loud

Here is the tension sitting underneath today’s legislative fight in Washington. Stablecoin issuers collected roughly $5 billion in yield from Ethereum deployments in 2025. The holders of those stablecoins collected zero. Banks look at that arrangement and call it unregulated interest rate competition. Coinbase and others look at it and say holders deserve a cut, hence the push for stablecoin yield programs at roughly 3.5%.

Trump’s Truth Social post on March 4 argued that Americans should earn more money on their money. That framing aligns exactly with the yield-sharing argument Coinbase has been making. Whether that is coincidence or coordination is the question covered in today’s earlier reporting on the Armstrong White House meeting.

What the Token Terminal data adds to that story is scale. This is not a theoretical debate about a nascent market. Stablecoin issuers running on Ethereum generated billions in revenue last year from a simple carry trade: take in dollars, deploy stablecoins, keep the Treasury yield. The policy fight is about who else gets to participate in that carry.

What This Does and Does Not Tell Investors

The bullish read is straightforward. Ethereum is functioning as settlement infrastructure for a business that generated $5 billion in revenue in a single year, and supply is still growing. If tokenization expands to broader financial assets, as the macro thesis suggests it will, the base of activity running on these rails expands with it.

The honest caveat is that Ethereum does not directly capture most of that $5 billion. The issuers do. Ethereum’s claim is on transaction fees and network activity, which are a fraction of the revenue figure. The $5 billion number describes the scale of business being conducted on Ethereum, not the revenue flowing to ETH holders.

Those are very different things. The first is evidence of product-market fit. The second is the open question about whether the network capturing that activity translates that activity into value for token holders. That translation mechanism, fee capture, burn rates, staking yields, is where the investment thesis either holds or breaks down.

The data shows adoption. Whether adoption becomes value accrual is still being determined.

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