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Contact VisaStablecoin transactions over public blockchains are exchanges of stable-value cryptocurrencies that can be openly recorded, verified, and accessible to anyone on a blockchain network.
There is a lot of noise in stablecoin data given that blockchains are general purpose networks where stablecoins can be used across a range of use cases with transactions that can be initiated manually by an end user or programmatically through bots. Some of these onchain transactions don't resemble settlement in the traditional sense.
In this light, Visa wants to show how stablecoins are being utilized, clearly and plainly, adjusting for inorganic activity from bots and other artificially inflationary practices.
Stablecoins facilitate near-continuous payment settlements, designed to operate 24/7, 365 days a year. Our analysis, based on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), reveals a significant trend: weekend transaction volumes are substantial, averaging billions of dollars per day. This underscores the growing reliance on stablecoins for round-the-clock financial activities.
The methodology consists of two main components: Adjusted and Unadjusted.
The adjusted criteria aim to remove potential distortions that can arise from certain activity, such as high-frequency trading, bots, bridge routing, and internal exchange operations. Allium Labs has sourced over 3 million labeled addresses, which are probabilistic determinations of the entities and thematic categories behind commonly used addresses.
Each transfer is also assigned a category for the use case. Payments versus everything else is the primary split. Finer categories (DeFi, centralized exchange flows, investment & trading, store of value) show what else stablecoins are used for onchain. A category can appear in Adjusted volume, Unadjusted volume, or both.
For unlabeled addresses, the dashboard utilizes heuristic based filters, including the single directional volume filter and a 30-day transaction volume and count threshold seen below. While not exhaustive, these filters are meant to make best-guess approaches while Visa continues to improve our labeling coverage.
The unadjusted criteria include labeled non-organic activity such as centralized exchange flows, minting & burning, and infrastructure (bots, bridges, MEV), as well as unlabeled addresses that exceed the thresholds of the filter above or are derived from internal smart contract transactions.
Single directional volume filter: only the largest stablecoin amount transferred within a single transaction is counted. This removes the redundant internal transactions of a complex smart contract interaction.
Adjusted address filter: transfers are included in Adjusted volume when they represent economically meaningful activity and the address has not sent more than 1,000 transactions or $10m in transfer volume in a given 30-day period. This removes high-frequency and high-volume trading wallets, high-frequency and high-volume smart contract addresses, and bot related activity. Centralized exchange flows and minting & burning are treated as Unadjusted.
Categories:
Payments: Real-world payment activity: businesses and consumers sending stablecoins to pay for goods, services, payroll, or person-to-person transfers.
DeFi: Activity with labeled DeFi protocols, including decentralized exchanges and lending markets. Example: swapping USDC on Uniswap or depositing USDT into Aave.
Centralized Exchange: Deposits and withdrawals of stablecoins to and from labeled exchange accounts. Example: Sending USDC to Coinbase (deposit) or moving USDT from Binance to a personal wallet (withdrawal).
Investment & Trading: Trading and short-term positioning in stablecoins, including large investment-style transfers that are not payments.
Store of Value: Wallets accumulating and holding stablecoins rather than spending them, closer to a savings or treasury balance than a payment.
Minting & Burning: Issuance and redemption of stablecoins by the issuer (new tokens created, or existing tokens destroyed).
Short-Term Routing: Funds that move out and back, or pass through, in a short window. Typical of routing, market making, or treasury sweeps rather than a completed payment.
Infrastructure: Bridges, bots, MEV, and other automated infrastructure moving stablecoins between systems rather than people paying each other.
Dust: Very small transfers below a minimum USD size, too small to treat as meaningful economic activity.
Unclassified: Activity that does not match a more specific use case, including gambling and organic activity that passed our filters but has no finer label.
Retail Sized: Transactions that fall under Adjusted volume in (2), and that are also less than $250.
Filters and methodology utilized for this dashboard were agreed on collaboratively by Visa, Artemis, Allium, and Castle Island Ventures.