The Bank for International Settlements published a working paper finding that widely used measures of cryptoasset, stablecoin and decentralised finance activity depend heavily on methodological choices and underlying assumptions. Drawing on granular Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron data, the analysis concludes that on-chain indicators should be treated as noisy approximations rather than direct measures of economic activity. Three structural issues drive the measurement differences. Bitcoin transfer values vary by up to a factor of six depending on the treatment of change outputs, while simple market capitalisation has reached as much as four times realised capitalisation during price surges. Smart contract programmability also obscures economically meaningful activity. Of 67.5 million active Ethereum contracts, the researchers classified about 13 million, including 1.4 million fungible token contracts, while trading was concentrated in a small number of pools centred on stablecoins. Cross-chain comparisons pose a further challenge because the same asset can serve different purposes. More than 20% of USDT holdings on Ethereum has at times been held in smart contracts, compared with about 1% on Tron, consistent with greater DeFi use on Ethereum and more transactional or store-of-value use on Tron. The paper recommends complementing point estimates with bounded ranges, making assumptions explicit, using technical classification alongside expert judgment and separating asset identity from blockchain infrastructure in cross-chain analysis. These approaches are intended to improve the use of blockchain data for financial stability monitoring, payments oversight and monetary analysis.

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