Stablecoin

Eighteen cards in this catalogue carry stablecoins in their asset classes, fourteen of them in on-chain analytics. The flag says the vendor covers stablecoin data. It does not say which tokens the vendor calls stablecoins, or which of the three quantities below it measures.

How it works

The legal term is narrower than the data term. The US GENIUS Act, signed on 18 July 2025, defines a "payment stablecoin" as a digital asset used or designed to be used "as a means of payment or settlement", whose issuer "is obligated to convert, redeem, or repurchase for a fixed amount of monetary value" and represents that it will keep a stable value against that amount. It excludes national currencies, bank deposits and securities, and it bars permitted issuers from paying holders "any form of interest or yield" for simply holding the token. A dollar-tracking token with no issuer obliged to redeem it does not meet that definition. Data vendors do not use the statutory test. Their lists are editorial, and they differ at the edges.

Supply is counted per chain, and chains overlap. DefiLlama defines stablecoin market cap as circulating supply, "excluding burned and non-issued tokens", times price, tracked per chain, and a chain's total as the sum of every stablecoin issued or bridged onto it. A token minted on one chain and bridged to four others appears on five chain rows, so a grand total built by adding chain rows includes each bridged copy as well as the tokens locked behind it. Reconciling supply and market cap works through the arithmetic.

Transfer volume is a definition, not a reading. Gross transfers, transfers net of mints and burns, and transfers with exchange-internal movements and MEV removed are three numbers for one token on one day. As our Artemis card records, that vendor moved its stablecoin transfer volume from the third kind to the second in July 2026 and kept the API field names, so a chart crossing that month joins two measurements.

Why it matters here

A "USD" price is often a USDT price, converted. Crypto spot markets are quoted in stablecoins as well as in dollars, so an aggregated dollar price has to decide what to do with the stablecoin markets. CoinGecko's BTC-USD reference is "the volume-weighted average price (VWAP) of selected BTC/USD, BTC/USDT, BTC/USDC, or BTC/EUR tickers", with the USDT and USDC tickers "first converted to USD using a USD_ONRAMP_INDEX". The result is labelled USD and is partly built from markets where no dollar changed hands. A vendor that treats one USDT as one dollar and a vendor that converts at the stablecoin's own market price give the same answer — until the stablecoin trades away from its peg, which is exactly when the difference matters. Where the bitcoin price comes from compares two published approaches.

Stablecoin-margined and coin-margined are different contracts. A perpetual margined and settled in a stablecoin pays profit and loss in that token; a coin-margined one pays in the underlying coin. Open interest and funding on the two do not add without a conversion, and CoinGlass and Coinalyze report them separately for that reason. See open interest.

A stablecoin dashboard measures supply, not demand. DefiLlama, Artemis, Token Terminal, growthepie and Messari all chart stablecoin supply, and supply rises when an issuer mints and falls when it redeems. Where the tokens then sit — an exchange wallet, a lending pool, a bridge contract — is a separate query, and on-chain it is answered from transfer tables on a platform such as Dune or Allium. Naming whose wallet is whose needs a label set, which Allium sells and Dune's card says it does not supply.

Check the list before comparing totals. Two vendors' "total stablecoin supply" can differ by whichever tokens one includes and the other does not — yield-bearing dollar tokens, synthetic dollars backed by hedged positions, euro and gold tokens, and small tokens below a listing threshold. Messari's card states coverage of thirty-plus stablecoins. Ask for the list, and whether it is fixed or grows as tokens are added, before reading a trend across two sources.

The peg is a claim, and the chart shows the market's view of it. A stablecoin's own price series is a price like any other, quoted on the same venues. A data vendor that hardcodes it at 1.00 has removed the one signal that tells you whether the conversions above still hold.