Landscape · Assets
Major assets — BTC, ETH, stables, L1/L2
Roles and evidence hooks for the assets decision-makers ask about most.
Bitcoin (BTC)
Settlement asset / “digital gold” narrative and the dominant ETF underlying. SoSoValue showed U.S. spot BTC ETF net assets of ~$110.1B (retrieved Sep 22, 2026 PT). approx — verify live Flows are volatile and macro-driven; ETFs abstract custody for traditional allocators.
Ethereum (ETH)
Smart-contract settlement layer; DeFi + RWA + stablecoin activity hub. Spot ETH ETF cumulative net inflows cited on the order of ~$8B by Sep 2026 (secondary). approx — verify live Ethereum is a common issuance chain for tokenized funds and stablecoins; issuers list the chains they support on their own product and transparency pages.
Stablecoins
Tether reports $184.16B of USD₮ in net circulation as of Oct 8, 2026, 5:56 PM PT (tether.to/en/transparency). Circle reports $74.1B of USDC in circulation as of Oct 5, 2026 (circle.com/transparency). These are issuer figures on different dates, not a market total. Link issuer concentration to GENIUS Act and MiCA EMT rules. More issuers →
Notable L1 / L2
- Ethereum + L2s — home to many long-running DeFi protocols; for L2 security models and risk framing, see L2BEAT’s published methodology.
- Solana — high-throughput payments / consumer apps; meaningful stablecoin activity.
- BNB Chain, Stellar, Avalanche, Polygon, XRPL — appear in RWA league tables and/or Visa multi-chain settlement sets.
Production note: don’t hard-code TVL. If a deposit or TVL figure is shown, use the protocol’s own published dashboard or docs, with its as-of date.