BIS: Ethereum USDT rose through 2024; contract share stalled

A Bank for International Settlements working paper published Sept. 15, 2026 reports that USDT issuance on Ethereum increased through 2024 while the share of tokens held by smart-contract accounts stalled. On Tron, smart-contract accounts held about 1% of USDT across most of the study’s historical series.

The researchers reconstructed USDT holdings on Ethereum and Tron by tracing token transfer event logs. They identified smart-contract addresses from contract deployments, classified remaining addresses as externally owned accounts, and cross-checked the reconstructed supply against mint, burn and blacklist-destruction events. The paper’s holder-balance chart ends before 2026 and does not cover later months.

On Ethereum, smart-contract accounts held more than 20% of USDT at points in 2021 and 2022 and hovered around 15% to 20% until late 2024. As issuance increased, the contract-held share moved to roughly 10% to 15%. The authors describe the change as a shrinking proportion of supply in contracts rather than a sustained fall in the absolute dollar amount held in contracts. Figure 10 of the study places Ethereum’s contract-held USDT at about $10 billion to $15 billion toward the end of the plotted period.

On Tron, contract-held USDT remained a small portion of supply, about 1% across most of the series, with dollar balances near or below $1 billion.

The paper notes that a lower contract-held share can occur when newly issued tokens accumulate in externally owned accounts even if the dollar balance inside smart contracts stays near earlier levels. The study distinguishes following one token across addresses from protocol-level total value locked measures, which attribute assets to specific DeFi applications and can count the same token multiple times.

The reconstruction shows how USDT was divided between account types on the two chains but cannot determine the holder’s purpose. Smart contracts that hold USDT may serve as bridges, wrappers or custodial contracts, while externally owned addresses can represent exchange custody, payments wallets or other uses. The authors write that a current claim about USDT deployment in decentralized finance would require an up-to-date breakdown of balances held in identified DeFi contracts, with bridge and custody contracts separated where possible.