More than 90% of stablecoin transaction volumes aren’t coming from genuine users, analysis co-developed by Visa finds, according to a Bloomberg report.
Out of about $2.2 trillion in total transactions in April, just $149 billion originated from “organic payments activity.”
Less than 10% of stablecoin transaction volumes are organic or come from real people, according to new findings by Visa and data platform Allium Labs, Bloomberg reported.
Out of about $2.2 trillion in total transactions in April, just $149 billion originated from “organic payments activity,” the report said. The analysis removed transactions done by bots and large-scale traders to “isolate those made by real people.”
The stablecoin market supply currently stands at about $150 billion, with tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) dominating the market with shares of 75% and 22%, respectively, broker Bernstein has said.
Stablecoins are a cryptocurrency tied to another asset class, usually the U.S. dollar, to keep a stable, steady value. They’ve come into sharp focus after PayPal and some others announced they were issuing their stablecoins. Legislation to regulate stablecoins is also seen to be the most likely to make it through the U.S. Congress.
“There is also a lot of noise in this 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,” said a note last month about the findings by Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s Head of Crypto.
Despite the discrepancy between total transfer volume and bot-adjusted transfer volume, the analysis found a steady growth of monthly active stablecoin users, with 27.5 million monthly active users across all chains.
