Today, Visa unveiled a new stablecoin analytics website in partnership with Allium Labs. In a blog post, Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, explained why the analytics were published. He demonstrated a frequently circulated graphic showing that stablecoin volumes have surpassed PayPal and are almost up to sVisa’s transaction levels.
However, Sheffield argues there’s a lot of noise in the data from bots. These bots perform necessary crypto activities like arbitrage, liquidity provision and market making. However, these are not conventional settlement transactions, so it compares apples with oranges.
Removing bot activity reduces 30 day transaction volumes from $2.65 trillion to $265 billion. However, active stablecoin users have risen steadily to 27.5 million.
We’d also note the statistics are for on-chain volume only. Most crypto transactional activity happens on exchanges, with Tether being the popular settlement stablecoin. These transactions are recorded within the exchanges own books, with only occasional on-chain transactions. While we’re no defender of Tether, Visa’s statistics undercount Tether’s true volumes (including exchanges) and show that USDC makes up a larger proportion of transactions than it likely does.
It’s worth asking why Visa is publishing these analytics.
Back in January we explored whether Visa might be considering launching its own stablecoin. While central bankers might be concerned about the thought, we concluded that it’s doubtful as Visa is not a direct-to-consumer company. On the other hand, it could launch a stablecoin issuance and multi-chain management solution similar to Japan’s Progmat Coin. We’d be shocked if it didn’t offer a wallet or other services, after recently launching a web3 loyalty solution. And it’s already actively involved in tokenized deposits.
On the public blockchain front, Visa supports payment to web3 merchants using stablecoins (USDC) if they use Worldpay or Nuvei.
