Bank for International Settlements publishes working paper finding nearly 60 percent of stablecoin transfer events occur within complex transactions

The Bank for International Settlements has published a working paper examining how stablecoins are used on Ethereum, finding that transfer-level data often misstates their economic role because many transfers are embedded in larger smart contract-based transactions rather than functioning as standalone payments. Using more than 593 million event logs from 141 million Ethereum transactions in 2025 involving USD-denominated stablecoins Tether, USD Coin and PayPal USD, the paper concludes that stablecoins are frequently used in bundled operations such as trading, lending, arbitrage, liquidity provision and settlement. The paper develops vendor-independent metrics to measure transaction complexity from archive node data, public contract labels and event signatures. It finds that 31.6 percent of stablecoin transactions involve additional contract interactions or multiple transfers, and that these complex transactions account for 59.96 percent of all transfer events because each transaction can emit multiple logs, in some cases more than 1,000 steps. The analysis also finds that USDT, USDC and PYUSD are not used interchangeably, showing distinct patterns in transaction complexity, urgency, timing and integration with financial protocols. The publication says these results matter for empirical measurement, market monitoring and policy design because treating each transfer as a separate payment can overstate transfer counts and volumes. It also notes that the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank for International Settlements or its member central banks.