If you want one number that tells you whether a chain is growing up, look at its stablecoin balances. Not the price of the native token, not the count of new tokens minted per day — the structure of dollar-denominated liquidity. For TON in 2026 that picture has changed dramatically compared to two years ago, and the change tells a clearer story about adoption than any other metric. This piece walks through how to read stablecoin flows on TON, what they say about ecosystem maturity, and which risks tend to be glossed over.
Why stablecoins matter for TON’s maturity
Every blockchain ecosystem follows the same arc. Early users hold everything in the native coin. Then they realise that payments and savings need a fiat anchor, and the network fills up with stablecoins. For TON, that moment arrived in April 2024 with the launch of USDT-jetton, and dollar-denominated liquidity has scaled by multiples since then.
Why this is the cleanest maturity signal:
- User retention. People think in dollars, not in TON. If a wallet lets you park $200 in USDT without exposure to Toncoin’s volatility, the audience sticks around.
- DEX depth. Stablecoin pools are the foundation of any DeFi stack. The USDT/TON pair becomes the pricing anchor for every other jetton.
- Payment infrastructure. Merchants do not want to accept TON directly because of volatility. They accept USDT, and cross-border payments through Crypto Bot or xRocket start to behave like regular fintech.
- A regulatory paradox. The more stablecoins flow through a network, the more seriously regulators take it — but also the harder it becomes to shut down, because every balance has a fiat counterpart with a legal nature regulators already recognise.
USDT-jetton — issuer, mechanics, custody
USDT on TON is issued by Tether Holdings (British Virgin Islands), the same entity behind every other version of USDT. The launch went live on 19 April 2024. In the announcement Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino framed the choice of TON as a distribution play: Telegram’s audience, low transaction fees, and a path to non-crypto-native users.
Technically USDT on TON is a standard jetton (TEP-74). A single jetton-master holds metadata and mint/burn logic; every holder has their own jetton-wallet contract. Reserves backing issued tokens are managed centrally by Tether and confirmed via quarterly attestation reports from BDO Italia — a public disclosure of reserve composition, not a full audit.
Things worth understanding about USDT-jetton as a user:
- Mint and burn are initiated only by Tether. Inflows into the network mean new issuance, which means demand. Outflows mean burns — exits back to fiat or to another chain.
- The contract contains a blacklist function. Tether can freeze a specific address, and this function has been used on TON in response to OFAC requests.
- The jetton-master address is published on tether.to. Any token using the USDT ticker but a different master is a fake.
By 2026 USDT-jetton has become the dominant stablecoin on TON by every dimension — supply, volume, holder count. Exact numbers shift week to week and are best checked on DeFiLlama.
USDC on TON — why it is so thin
The story of USDC on TON is the opposite of USDT’s. Circle, the USDC issuer, has not launched USDC natively on TON. The USDC balances that do exist in the network are bridged versions routed through third-party cross-chain protocols — they are not a direct liability of Circle.
What that changes in practice:
- A different risk profile. Holding USDC on Ethereum means you carry Circle risk. Holding USDC on TON means you carry bridge risk plus, indirectly, Circle risk. If the bridge gets exploited, there is no direct redemption path back to Circle.
- Liquidity is thin. Deep USDC/TON or USDC/USDT pools on DEXes are rare. Large swaps hit visible slippage.
- The contrast with Ethereum is informative. On Ethereum, USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by supply behind USDT. On TON it trails USDT by a wide margin and sits closer to experimental synthetic dollars in market share.
Why Circle is not in a hurry: the company has publicly favoured a conservative launch strategy, prioritising networks with clear regulatory positioning. TON looks promising to them but not yet ready. If that calculus changes, a native USDC launch on TON would be one of the more material liquidity events the chain could experience.
USDe and sUSDe — Ethena enters the ecosystem
Through 2024–2025 Ethena Labs brought its synthetic dollar USDe onto TON via partnership integrations. USDe is not a classical stablecoin with bank reserves. It is a delta-neutral position: Ethena holds spot ETH/BTC/LSTs and simultaneously runs short perpetual futures against them. The aggregate market exposure is close to zero, and yield comes from the funding rate paid by long perp traders.
sUSDe is the staked version of USDe. A holder can stake USDe and receive sUSDe, which accrues funding yield over time. So sUSDe is not strictly stable: its dollar price rises as yield compounds.
What this means for a TON user:
- USDe for payments and DEX activity when you want an additional stablecoin beyond USDT.
- sUSDe for passive yield. Buy, hold, accrue. The yield is floating and depends on market conditions — when perp long bias is extreme, funding is high; in negative-funding regimes, the yield can drop to zero or below.
- The risks are specific. USDe can depeg during sustained negative funding, if hedge venues lose liquidity, or if Ethena hits operational trouble. This is not Tether-style counterparty risk; it is market-mechanism risk.
By 2026 USDe and sUSDe have not challenged USDT’s dominance by volume but have carved out an important niche: a stablecoin with embedded yield that does not require parking funds in a centralised lending platform. Allocation share within TVL is best tracked on DeFiLlama → Ethena → Chains.
Where to watch the flows
A few sources I use regularly:
- DeFiLlama Stablecoins, filtered by TON. Total stablecoin cap on the chain, breakdown by issuer, and day-over-day plus week-over-week change.
- Tonviewer or TonScan at a jetton-master address. Total supply, holder count, largest jetton-wallets. Useful to verify you are holding the real token.
- TonStat for aggregated on-chain metrics, including stablecoin balances and activity.
- STON.fi Analytics and DeDust Stats for swap volume in stablecoin pairs. If USDT/TON volume rises consistently, that points to real usage rather than passive parking.
-
Dune dashboards for deeper analysis. The TON community has been building higher-quality public dashboards; search the
ton stablecoinstag.
One rule that saves time: a single metric never works. Read supply, volume and active addresses together. If supply is rising while volume is flat, you are looking at passive parking, not active usage.
Risks: custody, depeg, redemption queue
A stablecoin is always somebody’s liability, and on TON that liability carries the same three vulnerabilities you find everywhere.
Custody risk. Behind USDT stands Tether Holdings and its reserves. Reserve composition is disclosed in attestation reports, which are not a full audit. Behind USDe stands Ethena’s operations and its hedges on centralised exchanges. Behind bridged USDC stands the bridge plus Circle. If the issuer or an infrastructural intermediary fails, your tokens become a claim on a bankrupt counterparty.
Depeg risk. Short-term deviations from $1 happen even to USDT — 1–3% in panic windows. For USDe, depeg is a structural feature of the mechanism. Depegs rarely become permanent, but they can last hours to days, and inside that window you may be forced to unwind DeFi positions at a loss.
Redemption queue. When too many holders want to exit to fiat at once, Tether physically cannot process redemptions instantly. Between “I clicked redeem” and “the USD landed on my bank account” can stretch from days to a week in stressed conditions. Practical implication for a retail user: if you need to exit a stablecoin fast, go through P2P or a CEX rather than direct issuer redemption.
What this means for a user in practice
A short, honest checklist:
- USDT is the working choice for day-to-day operations in the Telegram ecosystem and on TON DEXes. Liquidity depth and integration breadth dwarf the alternatives.
- Bridged USDC is for specific cases where you need USDC specifically. Not the best vehicle for long-term holding — you stack bridge risk on top of issuer risk.
- USDe and sUSDe are for users who understand the mechanism. Not a stablecoin in the classical sense; treat them as a yield product with a comprehensible but non-trivial risk profile.
- Do not concentrate everything in one issuer. If you keep more than $5–10k in TON stablecoins, split between USDT and at least one alternative.
- Check the flows regularly. Multi-week USDT outflows from TON signal that part of the audience is leaving. Sustained inflows signal the opposite.
Closing thought
Stablecoin flows are the most honest mirror of what is actually happening on a chain. Toncoin’s price moves with news cycles and broad-market beta; new-jetton counts move with spam. But the amount of dollars sitting in USDT wallets, the volume in stablecoin pools, and how stable those numbers are over time — that is real usage.
By 2026 TON has moved on this metric from “experimental network” into “working payment infrastructure with non-trivial dollar liquidity”. That does not make it risk-free — every classical stablecoin risk lives here too. But it justifies treating TON less as a venture bet and more as a usable rail for cross-border payments and in-Telegram settlement. The next sensible step is to learn how to read TON DeFi metrics as a whole, and not confuse TVL with real usage.
