Weekly On-Chain Transaction Data Report - October 5 - 11, 2026

Overview: The Series' First Contraction, Led by USDC

After eight weeks of net-positive prints, this week closed negative. Total supply ended at $311.08B on October 11, down $0.89B (-0.29%) from the October 4 pull print of $311.97B, after peaking at $312.81B on Wednesday and troughing at $310.98B on Saturday. One measurement note up front: DefiLlama's current series now prints October 4 at $311.97B, versus the $311.65B we reported last week - a +$0.32B retro-revision of the same day, the second consecutive week the aggregate has drifted upward after publication. We quote the current series as authoritative and flag the revision. The composition made the week: USDC fell from $74.22B to $73.13B (-$1.09B, -1.47%), its second consecutive weekly decline for a combined -$2.29B over two weeks, while USDT added just $0.04B (+0.02%). Prices did their part to make it feel dramatic - a $487M long-liquidation cascade took Bitcoin below $83,000 on Wednesday - but the settlement layer's costs did not move at all.

1. Network Activity

The week's price path was a round trip downward: Monday's 00:00 UTC print of $86,490 was the week's high and roughly +2.1% above the prior close, then the market broke on Wednesday - Bitcoin fell below $83,000 intraday as $487M of long positions liquidated - and bottomed at the Friday 00:00 print of $81,686 before a modest weekend recovery to $82,918. On closing measures the week ran -2.2% for Bitcoin, -6.8% for Ethereum ($2,726 to $2,504) and -1.4% for TRX ($0.3357 to $0.3306). None of it produced congestion: block space stayed unsold on every major chain through the heaviest liquidation day since June.

Network-scale activity: no newer weekly volume flash from TRON DAO was announced in this window, so the October 1 print - weekly stablecoin transfer volume approaching $190B across nearly 100M transactions - remains the latest official figure. Polygon's October 7 announcement cited TRON at more than $94B in circulating USDT and over $30T in cumulative transfer volume; TRON DAO's October reporting puts the chain past 407M accounts and near $28B in TVL. The standing estimates of about 7.5M stablecoin transfers per day and roughly 185 transfers above $1M per day are carried unchanged and labelled as estimates.

2. Stablecoin Settlement

The daily path shows three strong issuance days (Monday through Wednesday, +$0.84B cumulative to the $312.81B peak), then three consecutive down days (Thursday through Saturday, -$1.83B) before a small Sunday bounce. The turn arrived midweek with the risk-off move: the two largest down days, Friday and Saturday at -$0.63B each, came as ETF outflows peaked and Bitcoin bottomed. Issuer-level, the story is USDC's slide - four of seven days negative, -$1.31B across Thursday to Saturday, a $0.15B Sunday bounce, and a weekly trough of $72.98B on Saturday. USDT was flat to the tenth of a billion all week until a -$0.23B Saturday print took it from $184.31B to $184.08B, where it closed.

The launch we said to watch printed its first number. Open USD (OUSD) now shows a measurable float in DefiLlama for the first time: $785.0M at the October 12 pull, up from $662.6M a week earlier - growth of about $122M (+18.5%) inside this week's window. The chain split is the design made visible: Tempo holds $508.1M (about 65% of the float, and the chain with the day-one launch liquidity), Ethereum $123.1M (up from $60.1M a week ago, roughly doubling), Base $84.4M and Solana $69.4M. Two honest footnotes: the token's tracked price prints $0.9945 - a slight discount consistent with mint-and-redeem being restricted to authorized businesses - and the figure remains two orders of magnitude below the incumbents this column measures weekly. Also worth logging: the tracked total now includes a genuinely new issuer for the first time in our series, so some of future weeks' aggregate movement will be OUSD's, not the incumbents'.

3. USDT on TRON

TRON's USDT float moved in a step, not a slope: five straight daily prints at $92.70B (Monday through Friday), then a +$0.74B jump to $93.44B on Saturday's print and a $93.35B close. Weekly change: +$0.62B (+0.67%) - TRON's largest weekly gain in three weeks, and it came on a risk-off weekend, which is the direction you would expect if the chain is functioning as the market's dollar parking lot. Ethereum's USDT fell from $73.43B to $73.10B (-0.45%), and the gap between the two chains crossed $20B for the first time in our series: $20.25B at the close. Ethereum's USDC position fell again - $45.54B to $45.16B - while Solana's USDC dropped 8.3% ($7.43B to $6.81B), the largest chain-level USDC decline we have recorded, concentrated across the Wednesday-to-Friday redemption days.

Two chain-level notes. Solana's split personality continued: its USDT float added 2.1% while its USDC shed 8.3% - the two tokens on the same chain moved in opposite directions all week. And the Base USDT series remained unavailable through our data endpoint for a third consecutive week (marked n/a rather than estimated); Base's USDC, $4.42B at the close, keeps grinding higher and now also hosts $84.4M of Open USD.

4. Fees and Gas

The decoupling held through the week's only genuine stress test. Bitcoin's median fee stayed at the 1 sat/vB relay floor - verified against mempool.space at publication, with all five recommended tiers at 1 sat/vB - through a -$487M liquidation day and a -2.2% week, making a typical 141-vByte transfer about $0.12 at the $82,900 reference price. Ethereum's base fee printed 0.27 gwei at our October 8 check and 0.0899 gwei at publication - both sub-gwei, both inside the band this report has carried for weeks; the Glamsterdam activation on Sepolia (October 6) is a testnet event and touched no mainnet pricing. A ~65,000-gas ERC-20 transfer stays at roughly $0.08 on the article-snapshot basis we use for the fee card. TRON's rented-energy path is unchanged at about 1.37 TRX per USDT transfer - roughly $0.45 at this week's $0.3306 reference price, a penny cheaper than last week purely on TRX drift - against about 6.5 TRX (~$2.15) burned.

5. Large Transfers and Whale Activity

The week's whale-scale flow was forensic, not commercial: the Ledger reseller drain consolidated roughly $93.2M across 315 wallets into attacker-controlled addresses, and the coordination pattern is quantifiable - 25 TRON wallets authorized the same spender within a three-second window, 111 Bitcoin wallets were emptied within a single block, and 41 small test transactions across TRON and Ethereum in the preceding two weeks show the staging. Tether froze $10M in USDT across 20 linked wallets; the remainder routed through Tornado Cash and stablecoin swaps. On the standing estimates: roughly 185 transfers above $1M per day and about 7.5M stablecoin transfers per day are carried unchanged, labelled as estimates. No new corporate-purchase aggregation was verifiable in this window; last week's 3,342 BTC / ~$286M print remains the latest we could source.

6. Exchange Flows

The worst ETF week since late June. US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $678.9M across five sessions, with Wednesday's -$484.9M the largest single-day outflow since June 25 and Friday's +$21.1M offsetting only about 3% of the two-day drawdown. Inside the week's split, Fidelity's FBTC lost the most of any fund ($380.3M) while BlackRock's IBIT finished slightly positive at +$1.1M - a redistribution between funds, not a uniform exit. Ether ETFs lost $542.2M for the week, extending a nine-session streak to -$697.4M since September 29 (the sum of the daily Farside prints); ETHA's 1-for-3 reverse share split took effect October 6, the day ETHA's -$201.9M outflow accounted for the entire category total. Solana funds posted their first negative week (-$25M, ending a 14-week inflow streak), ZEC funds -$30.8M, Hyperliquid funds -$9.4M: roughly $1.29B combined.

7. Staking and Energy Market

Quiet on the cost side, busy on the wrapper side. Rental quotes held the ~1.37 TRX per USDT-transfer reference all week with no burn-versus-rental spread shift, and no staking-parameter or energy-price governance moves were observed. The regulatory item that touches this market is Treasury and the IRS's October 6 update of the staking safe harbor for ETP trusts - cleaner mechanics for covered protocols, custodians and slashing protection lower the operating cost of exactly the wrapper TRXS runs. On the technology side, TRON's post-quantum signature support has been live on the Nile testnet since July 2 (Committee Proposal No. 20628), with Justin Sun saying on October 10 it could be enabled on mainnet at any time pending governance approval - a long-dated insurance policy for a chain whose product is holding $94B of dollar tokens, with no effect on today's energy pricing.

8. Anomaly Scan

Four anomalies, three explainable. First, the series' first negative weekly close (-0.29%): led entirely by USDC's second consecutive weekly decline, with the trough landing on the same Saturday the Ledger drain dominated the news cycle - we note the coincidence and do not claim causation, since issuer-level redemptions have been running since the prior week. Second, Solana's USDC at -8.3% is the largest chain-level USDC decline we have recorded; it coincides with the Wednesday-to-Friday redemption days and with Solana ETFs posting their first negative week. Third, TRON's USDT step function - five flat prints then a +$0.74B Saturday jump - looks like an issuance batch rather than organic drift, and Saturday issuance during a risk-off weekend is the pattern you expect if TRON is the market's parking lot. Fourth, the non-anomaly worth stating: a -$487M liquidation day moved every cost series we track by exactly zero.

9. What the Data Says About the Trend

Two weeks now read as a pair: a redemption week, then a deeper-feeling one that actually flipped the aggregate negative for the first time in our series. USDC is down $2.29B over the two weeks while USDT is up $0.31B - and USDT on TRON is up $0.85B over the same stretch, more than all of USDT's net growth. The TRON-Ethereum gap crossing $20B is the milestone version of a trend that has run for weeks: the chain where USDT is a payment instrument keeps gaining share over the chain where it is mostly a DeFi collateral leg. Meanwhile Open USD's $785M first print makes the tracked universe a three-issuer story for the first time - the incumbents still hold over 82% combined, but future aggregate moves now have a third contributor. Costs, again, moved nowhere: five consecutive weeks of flat fee series through two price events.

10. Outlook for Next Week

• Open USD's second full week in the issuer tables - whether the Tempo-heavy 65% concentration holds, and whether the $0.9945 secondary discount closes as mint-and-redeem access widens.
• USDC's trajectory: a third consecutive weekly decline would make October the issuer's deepest three-week stretch in our series.
• Ledger forensic findings - whether the confirmed implant explains all 315 wallets, and how much of Tether's $10M freeze converts into recoveries.
• Samsung Wallet's USDC rollout in the last week of October - the first phone-OEM integration, with Solana and Sui rails behind it.
• Solana's epoch 1053 confirmation at 200ms slots, and the CFTC comment clock on Regulation CTX/CAM.

11. Methodology Notes

Supply figures are DefiLlama stablecoin chart prints at 00:00 UTC daily closes from the same endpoint series each week; the October 4 retro-revision (+$0.32B versus our published $311.65B) is disclosed in the overview. Per-chain figures come from the same provider's chain-level series for USDT and USDC; the Base USDT series was unavailable at pull time and is marked n/a rather than estimated. Open USD figures are the provider's issuer-level print (asset id 443) as of the October 12 pull, with its week-over-week change computed from the provider's own prior-week field. Prices are DefiLlama coin-history prints at 00:00 UTC. Fee and gas figures are mempool.space and Owlracle/Blockchair verifications as dated in the text. ETF flows are Farside Investors daily prints as reported by the aggregators named in section 6; the weekly totals and all ten daily prints quoted here reconcile to the same source. TRON transfer-volume figures are TRON DAO and chain-announced prints, dated. DefiLlama's aggregate series is subject to ongoing retro-revision; figures here are pull-time prints. Estimates are labelled as estimates; nothing on this page is investment advice.