Ratings · Measured, not sponsored
Stablecoins
A stablecoin is a promise to pay you a dollar, made by somebody. This rating is about who that somebody is, what they hold against the promise, who checks it — and what they can do to your balance without asking you.
A US-listed issuer with audited financials on top of monthly attestations. It also fell to $0.87 in 2023, and can freeze your address.
$183bn across 130 chains and a peg record better than its critics predicted — on quarterly attestations, not an audit, with billions already frozen.
The only large stablecoin where the reserve yield reaches you instead of the issuer. Increasingly backed by off-chain assets you cannot inspect.
What we did · August 27, 2026We read the reserve attestations and asked what kind of document each one actually is, recorded who can freeze a balance and whether they have used it, and measured the live deviation from a dollar alongside every historical break.
Nearly every coin here can be switched off
USDT, USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD and USDG all carry a blacklist function. It is not dormant — Tether has frozen billions of dollars across thousands of addresses.
That is a regulated issuer cooperating with law enforcement, and it is also the fact that decides what a stablecoin actually is: a claim on a company that can revoke it. Anyone holding one because “nobody can take it” has bought the wrong instrument. It carries 18% of the score here, and we record it as a fact rather than a verdict.
The peg is only as good as the venue quoting it
On 10 October 2025, USDe printed $0.65 on Binance while trading at $0.99 on-chain. Collateralisation never dropped below about 110%.
Binance’s unified-account oracle read its own ~$8m internal order book instead of the ~$400m of liquidity next door, and roughly $1bn of forced liquidations followed. The same mechanism, on the same day, printed an 88% discount on wBETH. Both assets were fully backed the entire time. What broke was the price source.
The ranking
Click any row for the quick read, or open a company for its full profile and per-criterion scores. Measured August 27, 2026. How we rate.
HOW WE SCORED THIS — CRITERIA AND WEIGHTS+
A stablecoin is a promise to pay you a dollar, made by somebody. So this rating is about who that somebody is, what they are holding against the promise, who checks it, and what they can do to your balance without asking you. The peg is the last question, not the first — every coin here trades within a few basis points of a dollar on a calm day, and none of them was designed for a calm day.
Sourced to primary documents: what the reserves actually hold, who attests and how often, and — the distinction the industry blurs deliberately — whether that is a full audit or a point-in-time attestation. A monthly attestation by a named accounting firm and a quarterly self-published summary are not the same instrument, and neither is an audit. Crypto-backed and synthetic designs are judged on their own terms: the collateral ratio, where the collateral lives, and what it does in a drawdown.
Every historical break with its date, depth and cause, plus the live deviation from $1.00 measured at a stated timestamp. Both halves matter: the current price says almost nothing on a quiet day, and the history says everything about what happens on a violent one.
Whether the issuer can blacklist an address, whether it has actually done so, and at whose request. Nearly every fiat-backed stablecoin can freeze funds — that is not a defect, it is the design, and it is the single fact most likely to matter to a holder who never reads a reserve report. We record it as a fact rather than a moral judgement.
Circulating supply and the number of chains it genuinely circulates on, from public data at a stated timestamp. Supply is the closest available proxy for whether you can exit at size without moving the price.
The reserves behind a large fiat-backed stablecoin earn a market rate. We record who receives that: the issuer, the holder, or a distributor. It is the least discussed economic fact in the category and it is worth billions a year.
Weights sum to 100. If we cannot verify a criterion, we delete it rather than score it on impressions — read the methodology.
Is there a free alternative?
If you are holding six figures of stablecoins for months, you are lending an issuer money at 0%.
The reserves behind USDT and USDC earn a market rate on tens of billions of dollars, and none of that reaches the holder — it is the single largest transfer of value in this industry and almost nobody frames it as one. If the holding is a working balance for trading, that is a fair price for instant settlement. If it is savings, compare it honestly against a money-market fund or a Treasury bill, which pay you the interest and cannot be blacklisted by a company decision. And whatever you hold, hold it across more than one issuer: every failure in this category has been issuer-specific.
What changed since last time
- 2026-08-27Category published.Stablecoin comparisons rank on market cap and peg stability, and skip the two facts that actually decide the outcome: who can freeze the balance, and what kind of document the reserve report really is.
Questions
Which stablecoin is the safest?+
On evidence quality, USDC: its issuer is a US-listed public company, so monthly reserve attestations sit on top of audited financial statements filed with a securities regulator, and it is MiCA-licensed in Europe. That is a materially higher standard of proof than a quarterly self-published summary. It is not risk-free — USDC fell to about $0.87 in March 2023 when $3.3bn of its reserves were stuck at Silicon Valley Bank, and it recovered because the US government guaranteed those deposits.
Can a stablecoin issuer freeze my money?+
Yes, and this is the most under-reported fact in the category. Every major fiat-backed stablecoin — USDT, USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, USDG — has a blacklist function, and it is used: Tether has frozen billions of dollars across thousands of addresses at law-enforcement request. That is lawful cooperation rather than misconduct, but the implication for a holder is unambiguous. A stablecoin balance is a claim on a company that can switch it off, which makes it a bank account with a blockchain interface.
What actually caused USDe to trade at $0.65?+
A thin venue used as a price source, not an impaired asset. On 10 October 2025, during a $19bn liquidation cascade, Binance’s unified-account oracle priced USDe off its own roughly $8m internal order book rather than the roughly $400m of on-chain liquidity next door. USDe printed $0.65 there while trading near $0.99 everywhere else, about $1bn of forced liquidations followed, and the protocol was 110% collateralised the entire time. The same day, the same mechanism produced an 88% discount on wBETH — also fully backed, also on Binance’s own book.
Do I earn interest on stablecoins?+
Usually the issuer does, not you. The reserves behind USDT and USDC earn a market rate on hundreds of billions of dollars, and holders receive none of it — it is the largest and least discussed transfer of value in this industry. The exceptions on this page are USDS, where the savings module pays the holder, and USDe, where a hedged funding-rate carry is paid to stakers. USDG splits the difference: it shares reserve interest with distributing platforms rather than with the person holding the coin.
Is a decentralised stablecoin safer than a centralised one?+
It is differently exposed, and the difference is smaller than the labels suggest. When USDC broke in March 2023, DAI followed it down, because a large share of DAI’s collateral was USDC — at that moment the decentralised stablecoin was a leveraged bet on the centralised one. Today the largest decentralised stablecoins hold substantial off-chain real-world assets whose custody and legal wrappers you cannot inspect on-chain at all. Read what is behind a coin, not what it calls itself.
How this is funded
It is not. There are no affiliate links on this page or anywhere on this site, no paid placements, and no sponsored positions. Nobody in this table can buy a place in it, accelerate their inclusion, or influence a score — and none of them paid us anything, because there is nothing here to buy. The full policy.