Visa has introduced an Online Analytics Dashboard meant particularly for stablecoins.
Visa’s new stablecoin analytics dashboard
The purpose of this platform is to make the complex data landscape clear, as it provides simple facts about four stablecoins, which are used on nine blockchains.
Visa’s crypto leader, Cuy Sheffield, wrote in a recent blog post that stablecoin data is publicly available in real-time. Still, it must be analyzed to be meaningfully compared to traditional financial systems.
The variability of stablecoin metrics is usually due to their different uses. In decentralized finance (DeFi), bot programs or smart contracts are used for arbitrage, liquidity provision, and market making, among others, which is very different from traditional settlement functions.
Visa also deployed methods to filter-out bot-driven data, and by applying a simple heuristic to filter out non-organic activity, the transaction volume for the last 30 days is adjusted from $2.65 trillion to $265 billion.
In an X post, Sheffield noted that stablecoin transactions are accounted for differently from conventional ones. According to him, if a user swaps $100 of USDC for PYUSD on Uniswap, it is recorded as $200 in the total stablecoin volume. This happens because $100 of USDC is moved from the user’s wallet to the Uniswap contract, and, at the same time, $100 of PYUSD is moved from the contract to the user’s wallet.
5/ For example, we found that if a consumer converts $100 of USDC to PYUSD on Uniswap, this is counted as $200 of total stablecoin volume ($100 of USDC from the consumer’s wallet to the Uniswap contract, and $100 of PYUSD from the contract to the consumers wallet).
We think it’s…
— Cuy Sheffield (@cuysheffield) April 25, 2024
To Visa analytics, such transactions will be considered $100 in volume. The website also offers charts and graphs with data on supply, transactions, and users of USD Coin USDC, Tether USDT, PayPal USD PYUSD, and Pax Dollar (USDP). The data does not contain the off-chain activities with the stablecoins.
Visa participates in several projects related to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. In 2023, it initiated an initiative to advocate for the adoption of public blockchain networks and payment through stablecoins, and it has already processed transactions with USDC.
Visa also teamed up with Transak to enable crypto withdrawals in over 145 countries.