A study by the Bank for International Settlements, or BIS, found that widely used crypto metrics can obscure economic activity rather than describe it cleanly. In Bitcoin, the researchers said estimates of onchain transfer value can differ by as much as sixfold depending on how transactions are measured.
The finding applies to Bitcoin transfer value onchain, not trading volume on crypto exchanges. According to the paper, the gap comes from differences in methodology, including whether change outputs and other transfers that return funds to the sender are counted in the total.
That problem is tied to Bitcoin’s transaction design. When users spend BTC, unspent funds are often sent back to the sender as change. On the blockchain, that can appear as another output even though it does not represent a transfer to a separate party.
The researchers wrote that 「Metrics such as transaction volumes, market capitalisation and total value locked often suggest a degree of accuracy that is not supported by the nature of the underlying data」.
Bitcoin market cap showed a separate measurement gap
The paper said the issue is not limited to transfer-value estimates. It also affects Bitcoin market capitalization. The researchers found that the conventional market cap measure has at times been as much as four times higher than realized capitalization, which values each coin at the price when it last moved.
The study was based on 100 billion blockchain records across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron. BIS said similar measurement challenges extend across the broader crypto ecosystem rather than remaining confined to one network.
Ethereum contracts and stablecoin usage added more complexity
Ethereum introduced a different measurement problem because of the scale of smart contract activity. Of roughly 67.5 million active contracts reviewed in the study, about 54 million could not be categorized using the classifications applied by the researchers.
Stablecoins created another layer of difficulty because the same asset can be used for different purposes on different blockchains. The paper said USDT on Ethereum was more closely linked to DeFi activity, while USDT on Tron was associated more with payment-like use and store-of-value behavior.
The contrast was especially visible in smart contract holdings. On Ethereum, the share of USDT held by smart contracts exceeded 20% in 2022. On Tron, the figure was around 1%. Because those use cases differ, the researchers said aggregating USDT activity across blockchains can mix together distinct forms of economic activity and hide how stablecoins are actually being used.
The BIS researchers concluded that onchain indicators should be treated as 「noisy approximations rather than direct measures of economic activity」.
Visa already separates raw activity from adjusted measures
The report noted that some analytics providers already distinguish between raw blockchain activity and adjusted metrics intended to better reflect economic activity.
Visa’s Onchain Analytics dashboard, which uses data from Allium Labs, shows both total and adjusted stablecoin transaction volume. Visa said its adjusted methodology is designed to remove possible distortions from high-frequency trading, bots, bridge routing and internal exchange operations.
The dashboard currently shows $6.4 trillion in total stablecoin transaction volume across the networks it tracks over the past 30 days, compared with $313.1 billion in adjusted volume.