America is accumulating bitcoin while exporting dollar-pegged stablecoins to everyone else, according to a new Chainalysis report.
The blockchain data said in its Wednesday report, “North America: Inside the Growth of Agentic Commerce,” that the U.S. became a net importer of Bitcoin in 2026 — for the first time since 2022.
According to the data, institutions this year have been buying bitcoin while retail largely sells.
“A dollar stablecoin is a way to hold dollars without an American bank account, and Americans already have one,” the report read.
“The rest of the world is pivoting to a digital dollar because it meets a need that American users don’t share. Meanwhile, Americans are leaning harder on bitcoin as an infinitely scarce store of value.”
It added that U.S. dominance keeps climbing: Since the 2024 launch of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, America’s share of global Bitcoin activity has risen every single reporting period — even as the overall U.S. crypto economy ($2.78 trillion) contracted 2.2% in a brutal bear market, retaining most of 2025’s near-doubling.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 after a decade of denying the products.
Managed by Wall Street titans like BlackRock, Fidelity, and most recently, Morgan Stanley, the funds had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs.
Institutions and Wall Street can now buy shares of the funds which track the price of bitcoin and take care of buying and selling the digital coin.
The approval of the ETFs has helped the industry mature, the report noted, and helped the U.S. become an overall bigger bitcoin investor.
Stablecoins, meanwhile, have turned U.S. debt into a “currency-of-choice for peer-to-peer economies as well as businesses working across borders,” the report continued.
“In the 2026 period we continued to see stablecoins enter new use cases most especially abroad, benefitting the U.S. companies, and the U.S. government, with billions of dollars in economic activity,” it added.
Since Donald Trump became president, he has signed a number of pro-crypto laws and executive orders. The GENIUS Act, signed in 2025, allows banks and other entities to issue stablecoins if they back the tokens with assets like U.S. Treasuries and provide monthly disclosures of their reserves.
