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BIS paper finds major gap in Bitcoin onchain transfer estimates
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BIS Study Finds Bitcoin Onchain Transfer Estimates Can Vary Sixfold
Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements have found that estimates of Bitcoin's onchain transfer value can vary by as much as sixfold. The paper, published Sep. 15, 2026, examines onchain transfer values rather than exchange trading volume. It warns that widely used crypto metrics can obscure real economic activity across Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins.
The gap stems largely from Bitcoin's transaction structure. When users spend Bitcoin, unspent funds are often returned to the sender as change, appearing as another output even though nothing is transferred to a new party. Counting or excluding those change outputs can dramatically inflate or deflate reported transfer values.
The study analyzed roughly 100 billion blockchain records across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron. Researchers found Bitcoin's conventional market capitalization has at times been as much as four times higher than realized capitalization, which values each coin at the price when it last moved. Similar distortions, they said, extend across the broader crypto ecosystem.
Ethereum presented a separate measurement challenge because of smart contracts. Of roughly 67.5 million active contracts examined, about 54 million could not be categorized using the study's classifications. That leaves the majority of onchain activity effectively unclassified.
Stablecoins add another layer of complexity. USDT on Ethereum was more closely linked to DeFi activity, while USDT on Tron was associated with payments and store-of-value purposes. In 2022, smart contracts held over 20% of USDT on Ethereum, compared with around 1% on Tron.
"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," the researchers wrote. They concluded that onchain indicators should be treated as "noisy approximations rather than direct measures of economic activity." Aggregating USDT activity across blockchains, they added, can conflate fundamentally different economic behaviors.
Some analytics providers already adjust for these distortions. Visa's Onchain Analytics dashboard, powered by Allium Labs, displays both total and adjusted stablecoin transaction volumes. Visa says its adjusted methodology removes distortions from high-frequency trading, bots, bridge routing and internal exchange operations; the dashboard currently shows $6.4 trillion in total stablecoin volume over the past 30 days.
The findings arrive as stablecoins push further into mainstream payments. The BIS has repeatedly questioned whether stablecoins are credible for payments at scale. The paper suggests that even basic blockchain statistics need careful interpretation before informing policy or investment decisions.
