PayPal Took PYUSD to 70 Markets. 88% of It Still Lives on Two Chains.

Revised October 5, 2026: figures corrected.

PayPal has brought PYUSD to users across 70 markets. Its dollar onchain lives in two places. Of PYUSD's US$2.71 billion supply, 88% sits on Ethereum (61.5%) and Solana (26.9%). Arbitrum holds most of the rest.

The concentration matters more now than it did a month ago, because PYUSD is no longer comfortably ahead of its nearest challenger. Ripple's RLUSD stood at US$2.52 billion on September 29, US$186 million short of PYUSD, after crossing US$2.5 billion on a month of heavy issuance. RLUSD's supply also sits almost entirely on two chains, Ethereum and the XRP Ledger, and its holder base is wholesale. Two payments-backed dollars of almost identical size hold their supply in the same narrow way.

Two chains, chosen for two jobs

The split follows function. Ethereum is where a dollar is posted as collateral and settled across DeFi; Solana is where it moves cheaply at consumer scale. An issuer that commits to those two, and little else, is choosing depth over breadth. Copies of PYUSD circulate on more networks through a bridged version, but those tokens are backed by PYUSD locked on the chains above and do not add supply. Visa has added PYUSD to its stablecoin settlement, treating the token as payments infrastructure even as its supply stays concentrated.

A flat dollar and a fast one

The two coins look alike on a map. They do not look alike over time. PYUSD's supply was about US$2.7 billion on both July 31 and September 29, a change of under 1%. Over the same two months RLUSD grew from US$1.59 billion to US$2.52 billion, a gain of US$936 million, or 59%. The gap between them narrowed from about US$1.1 billion to US$186 million.

PYUSD's flat total also hides movement underneath it. Its Ethereum supply has fallen from US$1.81 billion in late August to US$1.67 billion. Arbitrum, the chain where it had grown fastest, is volatile: supply there fell from US$375 million to US$253 million in a single day on September 23 before partly recovering. Meanwhile, RLUSD added US$151 million in 30 days, more than four-fifths of the remaining gap.

Why it matters

The comparison tests a common assumption about stablecoins: that the issuer with the largest consumer network wins. PayPal has the network. Its 70-market expansion puts PYUSD in front of more users than almost any other dollar token can reach, yet onchain supply has not moved. RLUSD has no consumer app of comparable scale; it is held by a small, wholesale holder base and marketed to institutions. In this contest, the dollar with the narrower audience is the one gaining supply.

That has three implications. For PayPal, consumer distribution has not translated into onchain supply, and the next lever is likely institutional placement, not more markets. For Ripple, overtaking PYUSD would be a milestone built on a narrow holder base, which makes the supply faster to grow and faster to leave. For anyone ranking stablecoins, a supply league table between two tokens this concentrated measures a handful of balance sheets. The question for the next quarter is whether either issuer can turn its advantage, PayPal's reach or Ripple's institutional pull, into supply the other cannot match.