As the GENIUS Act turns one, a year of consumer behavior across 219 countries and territories shows how digital dollars have evolved since the law passed.
The GENIUS Act turns one on July 18, the same day six federal agencies face a statutory deadline to finalize its implementing rules. Much of the coverage this week will focus on the regulators, and reasonably so, because the rulemaking will shape who can issue stablecoins in the United States for years to come. We want to contribute the part of the story that rulemaking won't capture: how people have actually used digital dollars in the year since the passage of this landmark law.
Phantom is a self-custodial wallet app, which means dollars sit in accounts that users fully control. Each figure below is aggregated and anonymized from Phantom's own user base. Issuers can report how many digital dollars exist, and exchanges can report how many accounts they hold on customers' behalf, but the data below helps illustrate what individual people do with digital dollars they have full control over. That view spans people in 219 countries and territories who held a stablecoin balance on Phantom as of June 30. What follows are the numbers that defined the year, and what they say a year under the law actually changed for the people holding them.
Balances grew over 20%, and the growth changed character
In the twelve months before the GENIUS Act, Phantom users held a combined average of $2.33 billion in stablecoins on any given day, a figure that excludes our own CASH stablecoin. In the year after, that average reached $2.82 billion, an increase of over 20%. These are consumer holdings in self-custody, measured as a daily average across the year, which makes them a different kind of number from the supply figures issuers report.
The more revealing change was in how that growth arrived. In the year before the law passed, adoption came in bursts tied to market rallies, with holder counts jumping by double digits in single months and then stalling. In the year after, there was no comparable spike at all, and holder counts instead grew steadily month after month across the full year. That growth also held through a stretch when industry-wide stablecoin supply barely moved, because supply remains tied to leverage and trading activity that has been unwinding since last fall. If the purpose of the legislation was to turn a speculative asset into ordinary financial infrastructure, that steadier pattern is what success would be expected to look like.
Most holders live outside the United States, and their balances look different
As of June 30, 86.6% of the people holding a stablecoin balance on Phantom lived outside the United States, yet they held roughly 78% of all stablecoin value on Phantom. The gap between those two shares means the typical international balance is smaller than the typical American one, which is the pattern you would expect from money that functions as an account rather than as capital waiting to be deployed. Nigeria illustrates the point clearly, because it now has nearly as many stablecoin holders as Canada while ranking 37 places lower on Phantom by total value held.
How people use digital dollars depends on where they live
When we pulled transaction data, we found that usage follows access. Over the past 90 days, 6.8% of US holders sent a stablecoin to a separate onchain address (which may include a separate wallet they control), while eight of the ten largest non-US holder countries transacted above that rate. Sending is the narrowest definition of activity we could have chosen, since it excludes swapping, trading, and spending, so these shares measure payment behavior specifically rather than overall engagement.
Nigeria and India lead the group, at 15.1% and 13.4%, which fits what the World Bank’s data would predict. In Nigeria, roughly a third of adults still have no bank account at all, and in India, where account ownership is widespread, accounts go unused at nearly three times the global rate. The only two countries below the US rate are Japan and Hong Kong, two of the most heavily banked places in the world, at 5.5% and 5.7% respectively. The pattern suggests that where banking works well, digital dollars tend to sit as savings, and where it falls short (whether through missing accounts or dormant ones), digital dollars are put to work.
What varies by geography is whether people transact, not how much they move. The median transfer is roughly $17 in the United States and across the largest non-US holder countries. We chose medians rather than averages deliberately, because the median describes the typical transaction instead of one distorted by a small number of large holders. The modesty of these amounts describes everyday money movement rather than large speculative flows.
What year two will test
The second year opens with the finalized rules, and with a more practical question about what regulated digital dollars can do now that the legal one is settled. Phantom's daily cash and account functionality (built on top of our CASH stablecoin) is where we're testing that question at home, and international expansion of our money products is where we're testing it everywhere else. Those dollars also do more on Phantom than sit still, because they sit inside an open markets trading wallet, and that combination (internet-native money next to internet-native markets) is what we think a financial home should look like for people all over the world.
The opportunity here is not trying to get Americans to replace their banks, but for people outside the US to finally get access to stable, reliable (and now programmable!) dollars, and that's exactly what a year of this data shows. The world is bigger than the US, and we're excited to keep turning these products on for it, country by country.
The finding we keep returning to is a simple one. The question the law answered was how digital dollars would be regulated in the United States. The question users answered over the past year was what digital dollars are actually for, and their answer depends almost entirely on where they live.
Methodology: All figures reflect aggregated, anonymized activity across Phantom's self-custodial wallets on Solana and describe Phantom users, not the broader market. The industry-wide stablecoin supply figure is from DefiLlama, a third-party provider, and is not Phantom data. Monthly holder counts measure distinct users with a positive stablecoin balance at any point in a given month and are not comparable to the point-in-time snapshot. Country-level value rankings exclude a small number of very large wallets. Balance figures exclude CASH. "Pre-GENIUS" covers July 2024 through June 2025 and "post-GENIUS" covers July 2025 through June 2026. Banking-access and account-inactivity figures are from the World Bank's Global Findex Database 2025. Holder shares reflect a June 30, 2026 snapshot. Payment-use shares cover April 15 through July 14, 2026 and count stablecoin sends only. Median transfer sizes use the same country cohorts as the payment-use shares and are estimated from a 10% transaction sample of roughly 14 million records. Country attribution reflects most common usage location and can misattribute VPN users and frequent travelers. Phantom never holds or controls user funds. Nothing here is investment advice. CASH is a stablecoin issued via Bridge’s Open Issuance Platform.
