OAK Research: Stablecoin Issuer Revenue Beat Chain Fees 7.4 to 1 in Q3

The $2.1 Billion Quarter

Stablecoin issuers earned about $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2026, roughly 7.4 times the $285 million that 13 public blockchains collected in transaction fees over the same period. The comparison comes from OAK Research, a French digital asset research firm, in a report published on October 30 that set issuer earnings beside network fees and concluded the two industries make money in fundamentally different ways. Tether and Circle, the two dominant issuers, do not charge users to move their tokens. Both earn interest on the reserve assets backing every token in issue, so their income scales with balances and interest rates rather than with network activity. Blockchains sit on the other side of the ledger: they collect fees only when transactions execute, whether or not a stablecoin is involved. OAK's 13-chain tally deliberately includes fees generated by transfers that have nothing to do with stablecoins, which makes the gap starker still. The firm framed the sector's scale through the circulating supply of stablecoin tokens, a figure that grew from $4 billion in January 2020 to about $298 billion by the time the report was published. It recorded the market cap peaking near $310 billion at the end of April 2026, a level OAK put at more than three times total DeFi deposits. Market cap, the report cautioned, measures the value of tokens in circulation, not what issuers actually earn, and a larger float does not lift issuer revenue or chain fees in proportion. On the issuer side, reserve income is effectively the whole business. Circle's second-quarter filing showed total revenue of $701.3 million, of which $667.7 million came from reserve assets, about 95% of the total and 5% above the year-earlier quarter.

Ethereum and Solana Split the Ledger

The chain-level detail shows how unevenly the fee economy distributes. Ethereum carried an average stablecoin balance of $146 billion in the third quarter, while Solana's balance fell short of $16 billion, leaving Ethereum's float more than nine times larger. Fees ran the opposite way. Solana collected $62.9 million in quarterly transaction fees against Ethereum's $34.6 million, despite holding a fraction of the float, and $6.7 million of Solana's fees stayed with the protocol while the remainder flowed to validators. On Ethereum, the balance between float and fees has shifted sharply. In the first quarter of 2024, Ethereum's own fees still exceeded the roughly $730 million of issuer revenue attributable to the stablecoins living on that chain. By the third quarter of 2026, OAK estimates issuer revenue tied to Ethereum's float at about $986 million, about 28 times the chain's quarterly fees. Issuer-side economics moved too. USDC's on-chain transaction volume reached $14.8 trillion in the second quarter, up 151% year on year, reflecting heavier payfi flows and spot trading settlement across networks. Average circulation rose 25% over the same stretch, yet Circle's reserve yield fell 0.66 percentage points to 3.49%, so each dollar of float earned less than before. Tether's average circulation grew 10.6% year on year, and the report, which relies on external volume-based estimates, puts its third-quarter revenue at about $1.5 billion. Distribution costs weigh on the Circle side: its second-quarter filing booked $324.6 million in distribution expenses under the Coinbase agreement, a structure OAK describes as platforms that secure user balances taking a share of reserve income. The firm also measured where stablecoins sit inside DeFi, at roughly 28% of Aave deposits, 37% of Morpho deposits and 84% of deposits on the order book venue Hyperliquid.

A Yardstick for Sui

The method behind the ratio matters for every newer layer-1 network, because it defines the scoreboard such chains are judged on: stablecoin float, and how much of it turns into fees a network actually keeps. Ethereum has drifted far from that balance, while Solana matches it on fee volume but not on protocol retention. For the Sui ecosystem, the OAK figures set the competitive bar plainly: issuer revenue accrues to whoever holds balances, not to whoever moves them, and Sui has spent early November working through supply and infrastructure questions of its own, from a 13.15 million token unlock on November 1 to Suiet wallet ending development after November 14. A tokenized Tokyo office sale plan from Blackstone points to where the next wave of institutional float may form.