Weekly On-Chain Transaction Data Report - September 28 - October 4, 2026

Overview: A Redemption Week for USDC, a Floor That Held Everything Else

After two weeks of issuance-led growth, this week flipped to redemption - narrowly. Total supply closed at $311.65B on October 4, up $0.45B (+0.15%) from the week's opening print of $311.20B and up 0.60% from the prior-week baseline of $309.79B. One measurement note before anything else: DefiLlama has revised the September 27 baseline down from the $311.29B we reported last week to $309.79B in its current series, so last week's +0.50% becomes +0.60% on the revised basis and +0.12% on the originally published one - the tracked universe includes tokenised funds whose marked value moves the aggregate without any issuance event. The week's real story is by issuer: USDC shrank from $75.42B to $74.22B (-$1.20B, -1.59%) in a four-day slide, while USDT quietly added $0.27B (+0.15%). Prices did their part to make the week feel loud - Bitcoin spiked to $87,000 on a jobs-report miss - but every fee series we track ended where it started.

1. Network Activity

The week had one genuine price event and it came from macro. Bitcoin spent Monday through Thursday pinned between $83,479 and $84,842, then Friday's September nonfarm payrolls print - 29,000 against a roughly 90,000 consensus - sent it spiking intraday to just above $87,000 before the daily close settled back near $84,500. Over the weekend it pushed again, with the Monday 00:00 UTC print at $86,490 confirming a Sunday-evening push toward $86,500 - up roughly 2.4% on the week by closing-basis measures. Ethereum went nowhere: $2,688 Monday to $2,687 Sunday, a 0.03% round trip. TRX drifted up from $0.3334 to $0.3354, +0.6%, leaving TRON's dollar-denominated costs essentially unchanged.

Network-scale activity stayed strong by every print we could source: TRON DAO reported weekly stablecoin transfer volume approaching $190B across nearly 100M transactions (October 1 flash), and Justin Sun's Korea Blockchain Week remarks put August's run-rate at about 11.4M transactions and $23B per day. The standing estimate of about 7.5M stablecoin transfers per day across chains is carried unchanged and labelled as an estimate.

2. Stablecoin Settlement

The daily path shows a front-loaded redemption and a weekend recovery: $311.20B on Monday, three soft days through a $310.42B Thursday, then three straight up days into the $311.65B close - within $0.14B of the week's high. The four-day USDC slide from Monday through Friday (-$1.19B cumulative) is the longest consecutive redemption run for the issuer in our seven-week series; the partial recovery over the weekend kept it from being a rout.

By issuer: USDC fell from $75.42B to $74.22B (-$1.20B, -1.59%), troughing at $74.06B on October 2 before a $0.16B weekend bounce. USDT rose from $183.79B to $184.06B (+$0.27B, +0.15%) in a remarkably linear grind - $183.79, $183.84, $183.84, $183.84, $184.03, $184.06. The two largest issuers have now posted opposite signs in two of the last three weeks, which is what a rotation looks like in stock terms even when flow terms stay noisy. Open USD's September 30 launch will enter this table from next week's print onward; free-mint issuance takes time to register.

3. USDT on TRON

TRON's USDT float ground higher: $92.50B to $92.73B (+0.25%), with a $92.39B dip midweek that was fully recovered by the close. Ethereum's USDT barely moved - $73.36B to $73.43B - and that difference in drift widened the gap between the two chains to $19.30B, a new record by our series and the third consecutive week the gap has set one. Ethereum's USDC position did fall meaningfully: $46.73B to $45.54B (-2.5%), consistent with the issuer-level redemption week landing on the chain where USDC is most concentrated.

Two chain-level notes. Solana's USDT float added another 6.4% on top of last week's 26% jump - small base, but the only chain in the table compounding at that rate two weeks running. And the Base USDT series remained unavailable through our data endpoint for a second consecutive week (marked n/a rather than estimated); Base's USDC, $4.38B at the close, keeps growing.

4. Fees and Gas

Every cost series we track was flat to the point of boredom, and that is the finding. Bitcoin's median fee stayed at the 1 sat/vB relay floor through the entire week - verified against mempool.space on September 28 and again at publication - making a typical 141-vByte transfer about $0.12 at the $84,500 reference price. Ethereum's all-in average remained sub-gwei: our September 28 verification caught a 0.093 gwei base fee, the current print runs 0.43 gwei, and both sit inside the sub-gwei regime that has now held for weeks; a typical ~65,000-gas ERC-20 stablecoin transfer stays at roughly $0.08 on the article-snapshot basis we use for the fee card. TRON's rented-energy path is unchanged: about 1.37 TRX per USDT transfer, roughly $0.46 at the week's $0.335 reference price.

5. Large Transfers and Whale Activity

The week's whale-scale flows came from corporates and bridges rather than exchanges. Lookonchain's weekly aggregation counted four public companies buying a combined 3,342 BTC (about $286M) between September 28 and October 4, with Strategy adding 334 BTC ($28.61M) and Bitmine 15,112 ETH ($40.86M). On the transfer-capacity side, TRON DAO raised the USDT0 cross-chain transfer limit to Ethereum to $20M per transfer (September 28) - a single-transaction size that only whale-tier flows used to move, now a standard bridge parameter. The standing estimate of roughly 185 transfers above $1M per day is carried unchanged and labelled as an estimate.

6. Exchange Flows

The exchange-flow story of the week was restorative, not speculative: Bitget completed its phased withdrawal restoration - Bitcoin first, Ethereum-family chains on September 29, USDT on September 30, and remaining tokens, fiat and P2P services at 08:00 UTC on October 2 - while publishing a 131% proof-of-reserves ratio across 19 assets and replenishing its protection fund above $300M. ETF flows, the other regulated exchange channel, cooled hard: US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in roughly $241M for the trading week (a ~90% slowdown from the prior week's $2.39B), with one midweek redemption day of -$148.69M breaking a nine-session inflow streak; later dashboard revisions put October 2 at $31.69M, which would cut the weekly total to about $82.9M - we quote the range and flag the revision. Ether ETFs shed roughly $118M (some trackers print -$138M), ZEC ETFs saw their first outflow at -$93.56M, and NEAR ETFs debuted at +$35.99M.

7. Staking and Energy Market

TRON's staking economy got its regulated-market milestone: TRON DAO rang the Cboe closing bell on September 29 for the Canary Staked TRX ETF (TRXS), which carries spot TRX exposure plus staking rewards accrued to NAV. The chain's Q3 TVL grew $3.3B (+13.2%) per the October 4 summary, and the mandatory GreatVoyage-v4.8.2.3 (Anaxagoras) node upgrade (September 30) optimized contract storage without touching energy pricing. The energy market itself was quiet: rental quotes held near the 1.37 TRX per USDT-transfer reference, and no burn-versus-rental spread shift was observed. A passive ETF buyer of staked TRX is a new structural demand source for the delegation float - small for now, but its growth rate is worth tracking as a supply-side variable in the energy market.

8. Anomaly Scan

Three anomalies, none alarming. First, the baseline revision itself: DefiLlama marking the September 27 aggregate down by $1.50B without an issuance event is a measurement artifact of the tokenised-fund component, and it moved the weekly growth rate by half a point - we have labelled it everywhere it matters. Second, USDC's four consecutive down days (September 28 - October 2) is the longest issuer-redemption run in our series; the weekend bounce and the absence of any depeg or venue stress say rotation, not flight. Third, Friday's $2,700 intraday Bitcoin range on the jobs print produced no fee response whatsoever - the 1 sat/vB floor absorbed a 3% price move without a mempool backlog, which would have been unthinkable in the fee markets of earlier cycles and is now simply the baseline.

9. What the Data Says About the Trend

Three weeks of data now read as a pattern: issuance week, redemption week, and a narrow net-positive week where the two issuers traded places. Through it all, the settlement layer's physical characteristics - cost, capacity, chain distribution - barely moved. USDT on TRON at $92.73B is up 0.25% on a week when its largest rival issuer shrank 1.59%, and the TRON-Ethereum USDT gap at $19.30B has now set a record three weeks running. The transfer-cost table, meanwhile, has been unchanged for so long that the interesting question is the opposite of the usual one: what would it take to move any of these numbers at all?

10. Outlook for Next Week

• Open USD's first full week of issuance - whether OUSD appears in DefiLlama's issuer tables with measurable supply, and on which of its four networks it lands first.
• Ethereum's Glamsterdam testnet activation on October 6 - block-processing and gas-accounting changes could preview the first cost-relevant protocol change in months.
• Whether USDC's redemption run extends or the weekend bounce marks the turn; two more down days would make this the deepest multi-week share loss in our series.
• Bitget's recovery program progress - how much of the $387.5M moves from attacker addresses into frozen or recovered columns.
• The comment-period clock on the SEC's custody proposal and the Fed's redemption rules - both now directly govern the issuance structures this table tracks.

11. Methodology Notes

Supply figures are DefiLlama stablecoin chart prints at 00:00 UTC daily closes, taken from the same endpoint series each week; the September 27 revision is disclosed in the overview and in section 2. 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. 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 SoSoValue daily prints as reported by the sources listed, with the October 2 revision disclosed inline. 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 the October 4 pull prints, and the provider's current series now prints about $0.3B higher across this same window - a level drift that changes no day-over-day relationship in this report. Estimates are labelled as estimates; nothing on this page is investment advice.