Agora's AUSD added $44.3 million of supply over the past seven days, a 17.5% jump that took it to $296.9 million outstanding on September 5. That is the highest reading since December 2025.

$197.7 million of it sits on Monad, a chain that shipped its mainnet on November 24, 2025. About $170.8 million of the Monad balance is locked inside two Pendle markets, and both of them expire on the same Thursday in October.

Where the money actually is

AUSD is a fully reserved dollar token from Agora, a company Nick van Eck founded in 2023 with Drake Evans, formerly of Frax, and Joe McGrady, formerly of Coinbase. VanEck manages the Agora Reserve Fund; State Street handles cash custody and fund administration. The reserves are cash, Treasury bills and reverse repos. Paradigm led a $50 million Series A. On paper this is one of the more conservatively plumbed stablecoins in the market, and CoinGecko ranks it 148th by market cap.

The chain split on September 5 reads: Monad $197.7 million, Ethereum $72.8 million, Immutable zkEVM $8.8 million, Mantle $5.1 million, Solana $3.4 million, Avalanche $3.3 million, Polygon $3.3 million, Sui $1.9 million. After that the numbers stop mattering — Katana $494,000, Arbitrum $101,000, CORE $875, BSC $30, Plasma $1.50.

Over the last 30 days AUSD's total supply rose $65.4 million, from $231.5 million to $296.9 million. Monad's balance rose $69.2 million over the same window. Ethereum's fell, from $75.7 million to $72.8 million. The growth story is one chain.

Monad has done this before

Agora deployed AUSD on Monad ahead of the mainnet launch. On November 22, 2025 the chain held $1.8 million of it. By December 5 it held $145.9 million. AUSD's global supply hit $359.5 million on November 28, an all-time high it still has not matched.

Then the money left. $123.3 million on December 9. $73.1 million on New Year's Eve. By May 28, 2026 the Monad balance read $31.6 million — a 78% drawdown from the December peak over six months, with no depeg, no incident and no announcement. The tokens were redeemed or bridged out because the reason for being there had run out.

The second wave started in mid-June, when Pendle yield pools for AUSD went live on Monad. Around July 2, alongside Aave V3's launch on the chain, Monad allocated $15 million in ecosystem incentives. By mid-July it was paying $75,000 a week specifically to deepen AUSD liquidity, per CryptoBriefing. The Monad balance went $34.9 million on June 1, $86.5 million on July 1, $155.8 million on August 1, $198.2 million yesterday.

AUSD supply on Monad against Ethereum, monthly

Bars are AUSD outstanding on Monad in millions of dollars. The line is AUSD on Ethereum. Ethereum has held a band roughly between $52 million and $86 million for ten months. Monad has gone from zero to $146 million to $32 million and back to $198 million in that same stretch. Source: DefiLlama chain balances, sampled on the first of each month.

The October 8 concentration

Pendle splits a yield-bearing deposit into a principal token and a yield token, each with a fixed maturity. The AUSD market on Monad holds $154.1 million of total value and matures on October 8, 2026. A second market, built on Upshift's earnAUSD wrapper, holds $16.7 million with the same expiry. Together that is $170.8 million — 86% of AUSD on Monad, and 58% of every AUSD in existence — carrying one date.

The tradable depth behind those positions is thin. LP liquidity in the main AUSD pool is $2.37 million against $154.1 million of deposits, a ratio of about 65 to 1. Implied yield on the principal token is 5.9%, aggregated 7.9%, up to 14.2% with a boosted PENDLE position. The underlying pays 3.5%.

The gap gets closed by leverage on the other side of the trade. On Aave V3's Monad market, the second-largest supplied asset is PT-AUSD-8OCT2026 at $75.6 million, behind syrupUSDC's $119.9 million. Plain AUSD supplied to the same market: $1.2 million. The token doing the work in Monad's biggest lending market is the dated wrapper, not the stablecoin. That market has $281.7 million borrowed against $306.9 million supplied, which is the signature of a looping trade rather than organic credit demand.

A payments token that barely trades

CoinGecko puts AUSD's 24-hour volume at $2.26 million against a $262 million market cap. Under 1% of the float changes hands in a day. USDC turns over several times that share on a quiet Sunday. Direct mint and redemption with Agora runs through institutional accounts, so retail exposure to AUSD is mostly secondary-market exposure, in pools that are shallow by design because the principal is meant to sit still.

AUSD's concentration has been contested before. Anchorage Digital's stablecoin safety matrix scored tokens on liquidity, depeg history and concentration risk, and delisted both AUSD and USDC over what it called structural risk. Van Eck rejected the methodology in public: "attempting to delegitimize AUSD and USDC for 'security concerns' … is unserious and bizarre." He has a fair complaint about who was doing the scoring. The chain-balance arithmetic sits outside that argument.

What this means if you hold a yield token

Here is the judgment: a stablecoin's chain breakdown tells you more about what it is for than its supply chart does, and almost every dashboard buries the breakdown two clicks deep. AUSD's supply line reads like a dollar token winning distribution. The chain line reads like a subsidised term deposit with a settlement date on it. Those are different products with different risks, and only one of them is described by the headline number.

None of this makes AUSD unsafe. The reserves are the reserves, State Street holds the cash, and every holder can get a dollar back through the redemption channel. The point is narrower. A supply figure built on a rate incentive tells you nothing about demand for the token itself, and this particular figure already round-tripped once on this exact chain.

Four things worth watching

  • The week of October 8. $170.8 million of principal tokens mature at par. Holders can roll into a new maturity or take the AUSD and go. December 2025 showed you what the second option looks like on a chart.
  • The incentive budget. $75,000 a week on a $198 million balance is roughly 2% annualised of subsidy. If Monad trims it, the implied yield falls toward the 3.5% the underlying actually pays.
  • The Ethereum balance as a control. It has sat between $52 million and $86 million through every Monad swing. That is closer to AUSD's real, unincentivised demand.
  • Aave's Monad borrow ratio. $281.7 million borrowed against $306.9 million supplied, with a dated principal token as the second-biggest collateral, is a structure that unwinds in one direction.

Before you park money in any high-yield stablecoin pool, open the issuer's chain breakdown on DefiLlama and ask one question: if the biggest chain went to zero tomorrow, what would be left? For AUSD the answer is about $99 million spread across thirteen networks, most of them holding rounding errors. That is the business the incentives are sitting on top of, and it is the number that will still be there on October 9.