What is stablecoin supply vs M2?

ODS divides USD-pegged stablecoin supply by U.S. M2 broad money to show stablecoins as a share of U.S. money supply.

What is stablecoin market cap vs M2?

In this benchmark, stablecoin market cap refers to tracked USD stablecoin supply from DeFiLlama compared with U.S. M2.

How much of U.S. M2 is represented by stablecoins?

The ODS percentage is the answer: USD stablecoin supply divided by the FRED M2SL observation stated on the record.

Does ODS measure stablecoin adoption?

Not by itself. ODS measures monetary scale: circulating USD stablecoin supply relative to U.S. M2. Stablecoin adoption also requires usage metrics such as adjusted transfer volume, velocity, active entities, and payment-like transaction activity.

U.S. M2 is a public macro benchmark for the U.S. dollar money stock, published monthly by the Federal Reserve as FRED M2SL. Stablecoins are global on-chain dollars, not a component of M2 — the comparison is useful for gauging relative scale, but should not be interpreted as stablecoins being part of M2.

Stable Tape · Methodology

Methodology

Onchain Dollar ShareDaily Assessment selection rules v5

How Stable Tape measures the on-chain dollar, freezes each day’s reading into a dated record, and states what the benchmark does and does not support. This page defines the benchmark. The Metrics register lists what is measured today, its status, its source and its cadence.

Stable Signal is not enabled. No evaluator runs against canonical records, and nothing is published or delivered under it.

A Daily Assessment is published only where the day’s evidence supports one. Selection rules v5 are the rules in force. The last canonical record carrying an assessment is 12 August 2026.

01 · The daily record

Daily fixing

Every canonical day follows the same three steps. Stable Tape observes the market at one fixed daily cutoff, freezes exactly what it saw into a permanent record, and protects that record with a hash so it can never silently change afterward. This chapter covers the cutoff itself, how a record is frozen, and what the hash actually proves.

Observation, cutoff and publication

A dated record is a claim about a specific moment. These are the moments it refers to.

Official daily cutoff: 16:00 Europe/London
Record window: Snapshot to snapshot
Numerator cadence: Continuous upstream
Denominator cadence: Monthly

The fixing is 4pm London. Stablecoin markets trade continuously, but a benchmark still needs a defined daily reference point. During British Summer Time the fixing is 15:00 UTC; during GMT it is 16:00 UTC. Records dated 2 September 2026 and earlier were fixed at 12:00 UTC and are unchanged; records dated 3 September 2026 onward are fixed at 16:00 Europe/London. Each record states the cutoff it was fixed under, so the convention in force on any date is read from the record rather than assumed. Because the two conventions are not the same point in the trading day, daily movement is withheld across the change: the first 16:00-to-16:00 movement is 5 September 2026. The change itself is recorded on Transparency.

Each scheduled cutoff ends with a dated public outcome: a full record, a level-only record, or no reading. A published reading may later be withdrawn. Stable Tape does not fill a gap, carry a figure forward, or quietly close a day that produced no reading.

The 16:00 Europe/London snapshot is the official daily cutoff. When an eligible immediately preceding calendar-day record exists, Stable Tape compares the accepted market totals at those two cutoffs. After a withdrawn or missing day, Market change and ODS change are unavailable, because Stable Tape never steps over that date and relabels a multi-day difference as a daily move. A gap in constituent detail is different: it can withhold Constituent movement for that day without withholding either aggregate comparison.

Market change = current accepted market total − prior calendar-day accepted market total
ODS change (bps) = ((current ODS ÷ prior calendar-day ODS) − 1) × 10,000

How the daily comparisons are definedMarket change, ODS change, Constituent movement, and what 24h means

Market change and ODS change. These are the aggregate daily changes shown to readers. They are available only when accepted records exist on consecutive calendar dates and both carry a valid market total. Full and level-only records are equally valid endpoints; a missing, withdrawn, unavailable or non-consecutive endpoint makes both changes unavailable. The published figures name both record dates and both record hashes, and the arithmetic is checked again before publication.

Constituent movement. This answers a different question: what the individual stablecoins did between two eligible source snapshots, including gross expansion, gross contraction and, where the evidence supports it, which issuer, chain or currency moved. It can be unavailable when Market change and ODS change are available. Aggregate change is never used to attribute a change to an issuer, a chain, a currency, a mint or a burn.

“24h” is a label, not a clock. Public daily figures are labelled 24h for readability. Because the cutoff is a fixed snapshot rather than a rolling twenty-four-hour window, the real interval between two consecutive snapshots is sometimes a few minutes to an hour away from exactly 24 hours.

The live benchmark reading and the frozen daily record answer different questions. Use the live reading for current context. Use the dated permalink when a figure needs to stay the same the next time someone opens it.

Publication	What it is	Citable
Live ODS reading	Current benchmark estimate against the latest available inputs. Suitable for dashboards and widgets.	No — it changes
Daily Tape record	The frozen official record for a date, written once at the 16:00 Europe/London cutoff.	Yes
Dated permalink	The preferred citation. Carries the Daily Assessment, its evidence line, the stored source values, the M2 reference month, the record hash and its own dated share card.	Yes — preferred

The latest record → The full archive →

How a record is frozen

Canonical records, bootstrap captures, declared gaps, and the difference between a frozen record and a reconstruction.

net movement = expanded supply − contracted supply

A day’s reading freezes automatically only once the source data has passed its checks: the figures are well formed, the timestamps are right, the individual stablecoins reconcile to the total, and nothing has jumped without explanation. Source data that is malformed or does not reconcile is treated as unavailable rather than published. A large or unexplained jump — in the total, in one of its parts, or in a name that has not been seen before — is held for a person to review rather than published automatically. Where that review finds the observation genuine, the day is published, and the review result is stored with the record and tied to it by hash.

Each full canonical record stores the supply level at the cutoff, its constituent breakdown, the issuer, chain and currency detail behind that breakdown, the benchmark reading, and the Daily Assessment selected from those figures. A level-only record carries no constituent movement, and produces no Daily Assessment or alert. Market change and ODS change are derived separately from the two frozen totals, so publishing them rewrites neither record. Every record is written once and is not overwritten.

Constituent movement is the observed difference between two eligible source snapshots. It is not Market change or ODS change, it is not a transaction-level record of mints and burns, and it does not claim to know when inside the window a change happened.

Canonical, bootstrap and gap. The captures dated 17 to 19 June 2026 are bootstrap records from Stable Tape’s initialisation. They stay published and clearly tagged for audit, and are excluded from the canonical series, official highlights, streaks and default citations. 20 June 2026 is the first canonical record, and the citable series begins there. Where a snapshot pair was unavailable, the date is published as a declared gap rather than closed up, estimated or backfilled, and the archive prints that date so the absence is visible and countable rather than hidden by a continuous line.

Reconstructed history is not a frozen record. Longer historical series shown elsewhere on the site are reconstructed after the fact from published monthly data. They describe the past, but they were not observed and frozen at the time, and they carry no record hash. Only a dated Daily Tape record is vintage-perfect: written at its own cutoff, from the values available at that cutoff, and never rewritten since. The two must not be cited interchangeably.

A gap is a statement, not an omission.

Integrity and permanent records

What the record hash proves, and what it does not.

Hash algorithm: SHA-256
Canonicalisation: stable-json-v1
Digest length: 64 hex characters
Permanent address: stabletape.com/tape/YYYY-MM-DD

Each canonical record is written out in a fixed, published form and hashed with SHA-256. The digest, the algorithm, the form it was written in and the time the hash was computed are all stored with the record and shown on its dated permalink.

What the hash proves. It attests that the stored bytes of that record are unchanged since it was frozen. Recompute it from the published record and it will match, or the record has changed.

What it does not prove. It says nothing about whether the source figure was correct. It is not a signature, not a third-party notarisation, and not a timestamp anyone but Stable Tape attests to. External timestamping or a public transparency log would be needed for that, and neither is in place. The archive deliberately keeps the two claims apart: correctness of the input and immutability of the record are different questions.

The bootstrap captures carry no hash. Where none was stored, none is shown and none is reconstructed after the fact; the record stays permanently published and reachable.

02 · The benchmark

Supply and ODS

Onchain Dollar Share (ODS) is the one benchmark this site measures: circulating USD stablecoin supply as a share of U.S. M2. This chapter defines what that comparison is and is not, the exact formula, the benchmark’s former name, and why M2 is the denominator.

What Stable Tape measures

One benchmark, one daily record, and a small set of supporting structure layers derived from the same supply data.

Stable Tape measures monetary scale: how large circulating USD stablecoin supply is next to the dollars already inside the traditional system. That single question is the benchmark, Onchain Dollar Share. Everything else on the site either freezes that reading into a dated record, or decomposes the same supply figure by issuer, chain and currency.

What it is not. ODS is not a CBDC metric, not a measure of geopolitical dollar dominance, not the USD share of the stablecoin market, and not a measure of adoption, usage, payments or transaction volume. It is not investment advice, a trading signal, a risk or solvency rating, a reserve audit, or an endorsement of any issuer, chain or stablecoin.

Stablecoins are not a component of U.S. M2. The comparison shows relative scale only; it does not claim that stablecoins belong inside the M2 measure.

The ODS formula

Onchain Dollar Share is USD stablecoin supply as a share of US M2. Every other published ODS reading links back to this definition.

ODS = USD stablecoin supply ÷ U.S. M2

Circulating USD-pegged stablecoin supply divided by the U.S. M2 money stock, expressed as a percentage.

Numerator: USD stablecoin supply
Numerator source: DeFiLlama
Denominator: U.S. M2, seasonally adjusted
Denominator source: FRED M2SL
Published as: Percentage, 2 decimals
Plain-English form: $1 of stablecoins for every $N of US M2

The percentage is the benchmark. “$1 of stablecoins for every $N of US M2” is a plain-English translation of that percentage, derived from the published figure rather than recalculated from the raw inputs, so the two forms can never disagree.

Companion comparisons may use other denominators. They are labelled separately on the Metrics register and never replace the headline benchmark.

The stablecoin M2 ratio explainer → The Metrics register → API access →

Terminology history

The permanent naming concordance for the Stable Tape benchmark.

Digital Dollar Dominance (DDD) was renamed Onchain Dollar Share (ODS) on 9 August 2026. The underlying series, universe and calculation were unchanged. Historical records retain the terminology used when they were published.

The series continues to measure USD stablecoin supply as a share of US M2. Records published after the change use Onchain Dollar Share and ods-v1. Some older DDD identifiers remain in place for compatibility; they refer to this same series.

Effective: 9 August 2026
Series: usd-stablecoin-supply-relative-to-us-m2
Calculation: USD stablecoin supply / US M2
Status: Formula unchanged
Historical policy: Publication-era vocabulary preserved

Why U.S. M2, and which month it refers to

What U.S. M2 is, why the benchmark compares stablecoins with it, and the reference month and release lag it carries that the numerator does not.

U.S. M2 is a public, independently published measure of the U.S. dollar money stock: cash, checking deposits, savings deposits and small time deposits. The Federal Reserve publishes it monthly as the FRED series M2SL, seasonally adjusted. It is used because it is the broadest widely-cited dollar aggregate that anyone can retrieve and check without a commercial licence.

Why the benchmark compares stablecoins with it. A stablecoin supply total on its own measures absolute size: whether there are more dollars onchain this week than last. Onchain Dollar Share asks a different question, which is how large USD stablecoin supply is relative to a broad measure of dollar money in the U.S. economy. The two can move in opposite directions. Supply can grow while the share falls, if the broader dollar aggregate grew faster over the same period. Setting the numerator against a denominator that Stable Tape does not control is what makes the reading a benchmark rather than a running total.

What it is not. M2 is not every dollar. It is one defined aggregate covering cash and highly liquid deposit and savings balances in the U.S., and it excludes much of the dollar-denominated financial system. Onchain Dollar Share is a share of that aggregate, not a share of every dollar in existence.

How the M2 reference month worksReference month, release lag and vintage limits

The reference month is part of the reading. M2SL describes a calendar month, not a day. Every ODS figure is therefore a comparison between a supply observation taken on one date and an M2 value that describes an earlier month. Each frozen Daily Tape record stores its own M2 reference month and states it on the dated permalink; the live reading is a separate, unfrozen surface that uses the most recent published observation available at the time it is served. The two can state different reference months while a newly released M2 observation is still under review.

The release lag. A month’s M2 observation is not available at the end of that month. Across the frozen archive so far, a new reference month has first appeared in a record roughly three to four weeks after the month it describes ended. Between releases the numerator keeps moving and the denominator does not, so ODS drifts upward or downward on supply alone until a newly released M2 observation is reviewed and taken into the benchmark, which steps the denominator.

Vintage limits. Stable Tape stores the M2 value it used, not the full FRED release history. It does not currently retrieve vintage M2SL series, so it cannot show what a past month’s M2 was believed to be at the time versus what it was later revised to. Frozen records preserve the value that was actually used; they are not a substitute for a vintage database.

M2SL is revised by its publisher. A revision changes what FRED reports for a past month; it does not change any Stable Tape record that already used the earlier value. See corrections and later source revisions.

03 · Supporting breakdowns

Structure

Alongside the benchmark, Stable Tape decomposes the same circulating supply figure by issuer, chain and currency, wherever governed evidence actually supports a current reading.

Supporting structure breakdowns

How the shares are computed. Their current status, source, cadence and freshness live on the Metrics register.

These breakdowns divide the same DeFiLlama supply figure the benchmark uses. They are derived, not independently sourced, so they always sum to the total the benchmark divides by M2.

The formula behind each breakdownIssuer dominance, chain distribution, currency, momentum, concentration and velocity

Issuer dominance

issuer share = issuer USD supply ÷ total USD stablecoin supply
Top 1, top 2 and top 5 share, computed from the ranked issuer list.

Chain distribution

chain share = chain stablecoin supply ÷ total USD stablecoin supply
Named chains plus an explicit “other” residual.

Currency breakdown

USD share = USD-pegged supply ÷ total tracked stablecoin supply
Places the ODS numerator against non-USD supply.

Concentration

TCD = combined top-2 issuer share
HHI = ∑(issuer share)²
Concentration context published on Issuers.

Stablecoin Velocity

adjusted transfer volume ÷ average USD stablecoin supply
Research beta. Separate from the benchmark and from the Daily Tape.

Issuer and chain classification. Chain comes from the source dataset; issuer does not, and is labelled by Stable Tape as described under source inputs. The grouping therefore stays close to one line per stablecoin, and an issuer’s separate stablecoins generally appear separately. When the source dataset or that list changes, the shares change with it at the next refresh, which is why a name that appears or vanishes between two snapshots is treated as a possible classification change rather than a real flow.

Velocity is not part of the benchmark. Stablecoin Velocity divides provider-adjusted stablecoin transfer volume by the average USD stablecoin supply over the matching frozen-record window. It is a usage-context research beta: it does not feed the ODS formula, does not enter the frozen Daily Tape, cannot select a Daily Assessment, and is not a trading signal. It measures turnover, not active users, payment adoption or investment demand.

Status, source and cadence for every metric → Issuers → Chains → Currencies →

04 · Not enabled

Stable Signal

Stable Signal is not enabled. No evaluator runs against canonical records, and nothing is published or delivered under it.

Two different mechanisms are described here, and confusing them is the mistake this chapter exists to prevent. The Daily Assessment reads each canonical record and selects the most important change it can support, so at most one reading a day, and only where the day’s evidence allows. A Stable Signal would be the rarer thing: a change that clears published evidence rules and is worth stating on its own. Most days are meant to produce none, and today none can be produced at all, because no version of the Signal methodology is in operation.

Stable Signal v7

The current candidate methodology for Stable Signal. Drafted and under review. Not effective, not implemented, and not enabled.Drafted, not effective

The current candidate methodology for Stable Signal. Drafted and under review. Not effective, not implemented, and not enabled.

What v7 changes

Drafted, not effective

Stable Signal is not enabled. No evaluator runs against canonical records today, and nothing is published, delivered or produced under it.

The Daily Assessment documented below selects one reading from every eligible day. Stable Signal's governing principle is the opposite: every fixing is evaluated, but only a genuinely new, material and exceptional condition qualifies as a Signal. Most days should produce none. The current draft of that principle is versioned v7, governed by a separate Signal Constitution v1 that is itself drafted and not in force.

v7 evaluates four object classes — Market, Token, Chain and Issuer — against a fixed set of economic patterns (outlier moves, range breaks, sustained displacement, benchmark transitions, share shifts and others). A determination resolves to one of the same four public states this site already describes: New Signal, Continuing state, No new Signal, or Unavailable. See How Stable Signals work for what those four states mean in practice.

Verified status of the draftWhat has been reviewed, what remains open, and what none of it authorizes

The v7 methodology document self-declares its own status: DRAFT. NOT EFFECTIVE. NOT IMPLEMENTED. It carries no effective instant and no methodology hash.

Its determination contract — the exact data shape one evaluation must produce, independent of which implementation produces it — has been independently cross-certified: two separately written implementations were run against the same 111 governed fixtures and produced byte-identical, semantically identical results with zero mismatches. That certification covers the contract shape, not the methodology's substance, and it explicitly authorizes neither SHADOW nor LIVE operation; calibration thresholds and constants are not yet set.

Several interpretive questions in the draft were closed through adversarial differential review between two independent readings of the methodology text. At least one interpretive question remains open, pending confirmation from the dedicated Signal Constitution governance lane. This page does not resolve it and states no claim that depends on it.

Source: docs/stable-tape-signal-v7-methodology-draft.md, methodology authority commit 0eeb741ef091b056221157ee0aed22c13fde76fe; determination-contract verdict: reports/signal-v7-semantic-contract/SEMANTIC_CONTRACT_VERDICT.md at the same authority. Documenting this draft is not an activation: it changes no evaluator, writes no ledger, and authorizes no SHADOW or LIVE state.

The Daily Assessment (v5, rules in force)

One frozen record. Published rules. One Daily Assessment. This is a separate mechanism from Stable Signal above: v5 is the rule set in force, and it selects a reading from every eligible day rather than reserving publication for scarce, qualifying conditions. Rules in force is not the same as an assessment published: eligibility depends on the day’s constituent evidence, and no canonical record has carried a Daily Assessment since 12 August 2026.In force

How the Daily Assessment is selected

Selection rules v5 · in force

The Daily Assessment is Stable Tape’s rules-based daily reading of the most important change in USD stablecoin supply. Each canonical record is tested against the same ordered families, and the highest-priority eligible observation becomes that day’s Daily Assessment.

No editor or language model selects the story or writes the wording. Fixed templates assemble the headline and the evidence line from frozen data. Once published, a Daily Assessment is never rewritten; rule and template changes apply only to future records.

Selection, presentation and distribution are separate. Selection rules choose the fact. Versioned presentation templates phrase that fact. Distribution determines how the frozen Daily Assessment is shared. Engagement may affect distribution format or timing, never which fact is selected.

Versioning. Selection remains on rules v5. The presentation templates have since moved from v5-t4 to v5-t6, and those changes affect wording only. A Daily Assessment frozen after each change uses the new template; a record already frozen keeps the wording it was published with.

FreezeSave the canonical daily record of USD stablecoin supply.
TestEvaluate the published Daily Assessment families in priority order.
CheckApply materiality, repetition, attribution and data-quality rules.
Select and publishFreeze the highest-priority eligible headline and evidence in every published copy.

Ordered public Daily Assessment families

Record validityOnly a complete canonical record continues to a market Daily Assessment.
ODS benchmark or milestoneMaterial benchmark changes and genuinely denominator-driven updates.
Archive extremeLargest same-direction day in a sufficiently deep archive.
Sequence reversalA material move reverses or interrupts the preceding run.
Weekly extremeLargest eligible day in the complete seven-record window.
Large daily movementNet supply clears the published large-move floor.
Multi-day streakA contiguous run reaches a published milestone day.
Weekly supply trendThe seven-record supply level keeps moving materially.
Quiet market with weekly contextA quiet day placed against the seven-record trend.
Issuer or chain trendA clean endpoint-confirmed move explains the weekly change.
Offsetting movementLarge opposing changes leave net supply close to flat.
Broad issuer movementConstituent movement is broad rather than concentrated in one issuer.
Quiet readingSupply stays inside the flat threshold after stronger tests.
Net supply movementThe plain directional fallback for a canonical record.

Benchmark changes rank first because ODS is the benchmark; archive extremes rescale the day against history; reversals identify a change of state; and rolling context outranks ordinary daily fallbacks. Issuer and chain attribution comes later because naming a driver requires stricter evidence than measuring the aggregate. Lower-priority qualifying facts may still appear in the evidence or supporting context.

The exact thresholds and guards →

Detailed selection rulesEvery published threshold, cooldown, attribution check and guard

These are the published thresholds behind the ladder above. The highest-priority eligible family becomes the Daily Assessment, and eligibility means clearing the thresholds, cooldowns, repetition controls, attribution checks and data-quality guards below: meeting one numerical condition does not bypass the rest.

Record validity. Incomplete, bootstrap and non-canonical records are flagged before any market reading is attempted.
ODS benchmark or milestone. A stable rounded “$1 for every $N of US M2” change or a raw ODS move of at least 0.01 percentage points may lead. An immediate one-record reversal in the rounded reciprocal reading is suppressed when the raw ODS move is at or below 0.012 percentage points. A new U.S. M2 observation leads only when the M2 value changed and absolute net supply movement is at or below 0.05% of supply; routine updates remain evidence.
Archive extreme. A record-level daily extreme requires at least 30 canonical records. Until the archive reaches 90 records, the headline states its size.
Sequence reversal. The current contiguous run is compared with the immediately preceding opposite run. Both compared legs must be at least $250M, the rounded reversal share must be at least 65%, and comparisons above 200% do not use reversal framing. An eligible partial reversal below 100% states the rounded percentage. A raw share below 100% that rounds to 100% says “almost all” and states the prior amount. Exactly 100% says “fully reversed” and states the prior amount. Above 100% says “more than reversed” and states both amounts. The same bands and amount rules apply in both directions. A one-day move of at least $250M may instead interrupt or end an opposite run of at least three contiguous records; the quantified comparison is evaluated first when both descriptions qualify.
Weekly extreme. The largest day in a complete seven-record window must clear $250M and a three-record cooldown, unless it is at least 1.5 times the previous weekly extreme.
Large daily movement. Net supply movement of at least $1B becomes the day’s large-move reading.
Multi-day streak. Expansion or contraction streaks publish at day 3, 5, 7, 10, 14, 21 or 30, or when an established archive streak is first exceeded.
Weekly supply trend. The latest seven eligible canonical records provide directional rolling context when their endpoint supply move is at least $250M. The records need not be date-contiguous.
Quiet market with weekly context. A day with absolute net movement at or below 0.05% of supply may carry that latest seven-record trend, unless material offsetting movement takes precedence.
Issuer or chain trend. Both endpoints must provide available level data, and the named level must be matched at both endpoints. The leading endpoint change must be at least $250M and at least 50% of total absolute movement on that axis. The aggregate direction must agree with the named move, and the chain bucket “other” is excluded.
Offsetting movement. Requires at least $1B of gross expansion plus contraction, absolute net movement at or below 0.03% of supply, a smaller side of at least 0.30% of supply, and a smaller side at least 3 times the absolute net movement. Names appear only when both matched leaders dominate their respective sides.
Broad issuer movement. At least 7 of the current top 10 issuers must move with the net direction. Absolute net movement and combined same-direction issuer movement must each be at least 0.05% of supply, and no one issuer may exceed 60% of that same-direction movement. All 10 issuers require matched prior levels.
Quiet reading. Absolute net movement at or below 0.05% of supply becomes the fallback only after stronger families and offsetting movement are tested.
Net supply movement. A plain directional reading is the final canonical market fallback.

Repetition rules. One prior directional run can produce only one reversal Daily Assessment. A different reversal inside the next three canonical records is evidence-only unless its current leg is at least twice the previous reversal leg. Suppressed reversal context is kept where the selected family’s evidence wording supports it; where the day is described as a rolling supply trend, that context is stored with the record rather than added as a third comparison to the published evidence line. Missing dates and flat records break directional runs.

When a mover is not named. One-day issuer and chain moves are clues, not the story by themselves. An issuer, chain or currency is named in the headline only when its move is large enough in dollar terms, accounts for a meaningful share of the day’s total move, and is matched at both endpoints of the comparison. A name is withheld when the prior level is missing, when a name appears or disappears entirely between snapshots — which usually indicates a classification change rather than a real flow — when the aggregate direction disagrees with the named move, or when the comparison is otherwise ambiguous. The residual chain bucket “other” is never named as a mover, because it is a remainder rather than a network. When no single mover can be named with confidence, the record says so instead of promoting the largest available name.

Reconciliation and the residual. Issuer, chain and currency breakdowns are decompositions of the same total, not independent measurements. They are expected to reconcile to the aggregate; where a per-chain decomposition does not account for the whole, the remainder is carried explicitly as “other” rather than distributed across named chains.

History wording. Rolling context uses the latest seven eligible canonical records: the current record and six prior canonical records. Missing dates are not filled and are never treated as zero. “Of the week”, “seven days” and “over 7D” appear only when all seven dates are contiguous. Otherwise the Daily Assessment uses gap-safe wording such as “across the last 7 canonical records” or “seven-record endpoint”. Archive-superlative headlines require at least 30 canonical records; below 90 records, the headline itself states the archive size.

Phrasing. Under presentation template v5-t5, reversal context that does not win the headline is stated as the share it reversed of the prior run, rather than by repeating the day’s own movement figure. Under v5-t6, an evidence line never restates a figure its headline already carries; it states the fact that supports the headline instead.

Provisional constants. The dollar floors, the 25% evidence-mention floor, the 200% reversal cap and the escalation multiples are provisional. With fewer than 90 canonical records they cannot yet be calibrated against deep history, and they will be reviewed as the archive grows. Frozen records are never rewritten: selection-rule and presentation-template changes apply only to future records, with both versions stored separately on each new Daily Assessment.

Supporting readings. Alongside the primary Daily Assessment, the Tape and the dated permalink show the ODS reading, the supply movement, and — when a driver can be confidently named — which issuer, chain or currency stood out. When no single mover can be named with confidence, a supporting reading says so instead.

What is published elsewhere. When Stable Tape posts a canonical day, the post carries the frozen Daily Assessment verbatim — the same headline shown on the dated record — with its evidence line and its dated permalink. A draft that does not match the frozen wording word for word is not published. Stable Tape also runs internal research over the same frozen record, including Stablecoin Velocity; none of it can select or alter a published Daily Assessment.

Daily Assessment selection does not use price, sentiment, trading volume, transaction volume, payments activity, settlement timing, sponsor input, predictions, advice or manual editorial preference.

Daily Assessment thresholds are versioned and may be refined as the record set grows. Material methodology changes are documented here.

Version history

Which version decided what, and which ones ever reached a published record.

Three versions are named across this site. Only one of them has ever decided anything that was published.

Daily Assessment v5 — in published records. The selection rules and wording templates behind the Daily Assessment, which is a separate mechanism from Stable Signal. These are the rules in force. 34 canonical records carry a v5-family template across four variants (v5-t1, v5-t2, v5-t4 and v5-t6), between 11 July and 13 August 2026; the last effective record carrying one is 12 August 2026.

Signal v6 — in no published record. The first candidate Signal methodology, and a research exercise: it re-read records that were already frozen. No canonical record carries a v6 marker. It selected, phrased and influenced nothing that was published, and altered no frozen record.

Signal v7 — in no published record. The current development methodology for Stable Signal, described above. Drafted and under review. No canonical record carries a v7 marker, it is not effective, and Stable Signal is not enabled.

The order is a sequence of intent, not of operation: v6 and v7 are candidate Signal methodologies that have never governed a published record, while v5 governs a different product entirely and is the only one of the three with a record trail.

Dates here are the dates published records carry, not the dates code was written. A version can exist in the repository long before it governs anything, and both candidate Signal versions exist there without ever having governed anything at all. A commit date is not an effective date, and none is offered as one.

Signal v6 (superseded candidate)

The first candidate methodology for Stable Signal. Historical: superseded by the v7 draft above, and never released.Historical

The first candidate methodology for Stable Signal. Historical: superseded by the v7 draft above, and never released.

Research is not a release

Historical

Production Daily Assessment v5, documented above, remains the rule set in force. Any Daily Assessment published is selected by v5 rules and phrased by v5 templates, and is a separate product from Stable Signal. In force describes which rules would apply, not that an assessment was produced: the last canonical record carrying one is 12 August 2026, and every record since states either that its constituent evidence could not support one or that evaluation was not performed.

Signal v6 re-read records that were already frozen. It separated the factual frozen observation, the daily assessment, Signal eligibility and distribution eligibility, and ran a full-history reconstruction over the archive. It never selected, phrased or influenced any published Daily Assessment, published nothing, and altered no frozen record. It did not become the public methodology, and has been superseded by the v7 draft above.

Stable Signal is not enabled. No evaluator runs against canonical records today, under this version or any other, and nothing is published or delivered under it. Enabling one would require separate approval, would be described on this page before it took effect, and could apply only to future records; it could not alter a frozen Daily Tape record. How Stable Signals work explains what a Signal is, and what would have to be true before one could be issued.

05 · What can and cannot be said

Publication, withholding and corrections

When required evidence is not sufficient to support a figure, Stable Tape withholds that figure and states why, rather than estimating, carrying one forward, or filling a gap. When a source is later revised, the frozen record that already used the earlier value is never rewritten. This chapter states the boundaries the benchmark supports and how later revisions are handled.

Known limitations

The boundaries of what this benchmark supports, stated as limits rather than as caveats in small print.

ODS is not financial advice. It is a benchmark for market context, not a recommendation, a forecast or a trading signal.
ODS does not include CBDCs. Central bank digital currencies are not stablecoins and are not in the numerator.
ODS does not include bank deposits. Tokenised deposits, bank-issued tokens and fiat bank balances are not in the numerator.
The numerator is USD-pegged supply only. Non-USD stablecoins are tracked as currency context and excluded from the headline numerator.
ODS is not transaction volume. It measures circulating supply, not value moved.
ODS is not a user count. It does not measure active wallets, unique users or payment adoption.
ODS is not an endorsement. It is not a risk rating, a solvency rating, a reserve audit or an approval of any issuer, chain, wallet, sponsor or stablecoin. Appearing in the benchmark implies nothing about quality, safety or regulatory standing.
Stablecoins are not part of U.S. M2. The comparison shows relative scale, not monetary equivalence.
The two inputs move on different clocks. Supply updates continuously upstream; M2 is monthly and arrives weeks after the month it describes. A change in ODS can come from supply, from M2, or from both.
The numerator depends on one upstream dataset. A shift in upstream pegged-asset classification changes the tracked total, and a small amount of non-USD-pegged supply can enter it.
The archive is young. With fewer than 90 canonical records, superlatives are bounded and several Daily Assessment constants remain provisional.

Corrections and later source revisions

How later source revisions affect frozen records.

A frozen record is never rewritten. When FRED revises M2SL, or the upstream supply dataset restates or reclassifies history, the records that already used the earlier values keep those values. A dated permalink shows what was known at its cutoff, which is the only thing that makes it citable.

The archive and a live source can legitimately disagree. Recomputing today’s figure for a past date is a reconstruction, not the vintage observation the record holds, and the site does not silently substitute one for the other.

Where a correction is warranted, it is additive. A data-quality note is stored alongside the affected record and printed with it, rather than the stored figures being edited. Methodology changes are described here and take effect from the date of the change forward; they are not applied retroactively to records already frozen.

A record hash is what makes this checkable. If stored bytes had been edited after the fact, the published digest would no longer match.

06 · Where the numbers come from

Sources and evidence

Two free, independently retrievable sources carry the benchmark, so anyone can reconstruct a published reading without a commercial licence. Every reading can be cited permanently, and no sponsor or commercial partner can influence what gets measured or published.

Source inputs

Two inputs carry the benchmark. Both are free to retrieve, so the figures can be reconstructed independently.

DeFiLlama — stablecoins

Tracked circulating stablecoin supply, by asset, peg type and chain. The USD-pegged subset is the benchmark numerator. Supply is used as the provider already states it in dollars; the price it reports alongside is kept as provenance and is not applied to those figures a second time. Which supply sits on which chain also comes from this dataset. Issuer does not: the provider does not publish it, so Stable Tape labels issuers itself, as described under structure breakdowns.

Numerator · upstream aggregation, continuous

FRED M2SL

U.S. M2 money stock, seasonally adjusted, published monthly by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Denominator · monthly, released after the reference month

Freshness is not fetch time. Observation time, retrieval time and cache window are three different claims, and Stable Tape keeps them apart. A published benchmark response may be reused for up to five minutes, so a page loaded a second ago can still be showing an observation made much earlier. Where a page or endpoint states a time, it states which of the three it means.

Both sources are freely accessible, so anyone can retrieve the same inputs and recompute the benchmark independently. The issuer, chain and currency breakdowns are available from /api/issuers, /api/chains and /api/currencies-supply; see Developers. Until 3 September 2026 the ODS reading was also written to a Solana mainnet oracle; that oracle is retired and its accounts are frozen at their final write, so it is no longer a publication of the current reading. Its program and account addresses remain listed as a historical record. See Sources for how each input is classified and what evidence stands behind it.

What enters the numeratorEvery supply category, included or excluded

The numerator starts from DeFiLlama’s stablecoin universe and narrows to the USD-pegged subset. Each supply category below is either included or excluded, with no discretionary adjustment in between.

Supply category	Treatment
Raw DeFiLlama stablecoin universe	Source universe for stablecoin supply data.
USD-pegged stablecoins	Included in the ODS numerator.
Non-USD fiat stablecoins	Excluded from the headline numerator; shown as currency context on Currencies.
CBDCs	Excluded.
Bank deposits and commercial bank money	Excluded.
Final ODS numerator	Circulating USD stablecoin supply.

Classification depends on the upstream pegged-asset dataset. If an upstream classification shifts, a small amount of non-USD-pegged supply can enter or leave the tracked total; this is carried as a known classification caveat rather than corrected by hand.

Citation and reproducibility

How to cite a reading so it still means the same thing later.

To cite a specific reading, use the dated permalink: stabletape.com/tape/YYYY-MM-DD. Each dated record is frozen, linkable and shareable, and carries its own dated share card. To cite the benchmark itself rather than one day’s value, cite this page.

Both inputs are public, so the calculation is reproducible: take the tracked USD stablecoin supply from DeFiLlama, take M2SL from FRED for the reference month stated on the record, and divide. Each record also states which two source observations its Market change and ODS change compare; a full record separately identifies the snapshot pair used for Constituent movement.

Onchain Dollar Share. ODS Benchmark Methodology. Stable Tape, 2026. stabletape.com/methodology

Every published record → API and data access →

Sponsor and editorial independence

Independence

ODS is an independent public benchmark. Supporters and commercial partners do not influence the formula, the data inputs, the source selection, the supply classifications, the frozen records, Daily Assessment selection, Episode conclusions, entity or network rankings, findings, wording, corrections, withdrawals or any published statistic. The benchmark is the same regardless of who supports Stable Tape.

No supporter sees an unpublished reading in advance or can veto a finding. Supporter identifiers are excluded from outputs that carry evidence, including frozen dated records, dated permalinks, share cards, citations, hashes and provenance stamps, methodology and metrics evidence pages and endpoints, canonical downloads, machine-readable records and dated entity readings.

No supporter identifier may appear in any published output that also contains a hash, a provenance stamp, a dated reading or a citation.

Selection is mechanical and the inputs are public, so this is checkable rather than merely asserted: the rules are published above, and both source datasets can be retrieved by anyone.

Short answers

The same definitions in the form they are most often asked for.

What is stablecoin supply vs M2?: ODS divides USD-pegged stablecoin supply by U.S. M2 broad money to show stablecoins as a share of U.S. money supply.
What is stablecoin market cap vs M2?: In this benchmark, stablecoin market cap refers to tracked USD stablecoin supply from DeFiLlama compared with U.S. M2.
How much of U.S. M2 is represented by stablecoins?: The ODS percentage is the answer: USD stablecoin supply divided by the FRED M2SL observation stated on the record.
Does ODS measure stablecoin adoption?: Not by itself. ODS measures monetary scale: circulating USD stablecoin supply relative to U.S. M2. Stablecoin adoption also requires usage metrics such as adjusted transfer volume, velocity, active entities, and payment-like transaction activity. See Stablecoin Adoption Metrics.
Why use U.S. M2?: Because it is the broadest widely-cited dollar aggregate anyone can retrieve and check without a commercial licence. See why U.S. M2.

Definitions

Open the glossaryEvery term used across the benchmark and the archive

Stablecoin: A cryptocurrency designed to hold a stable value, usually by being pegged one-to-one to a fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar.
Pegged asset: Any digital token whose value is tied to an external reference, such as a national currency, a commodity, or a basket of assets.
Market cap: The total value of all units of an asset in circulation: supply multiplied by the current price per unit.
M2: A broad measure of money that includes cash, checking deposits, savings deposits and small time deposits, published monthly by the Federal Reserve.
M1: A narrower measure than M2. Since the May 2020 redefinition, official M1 also includes savings deposits and other broad liquid balances, so it is no longer a clean measure of instantly spendable money. ODS therefore does not use official M1 as a transactional denominator; the planned ODS Active companion reconstructs a transactional base instead. See the Metrics register.
No reading: A dated outcome showing that Stable Tape did not publish a numerical reading for that cutoff. No value is estimated, carried forward, or filled in later.
Official record: A complete frozen Daily Tape record that is part of the citable series and may carry a Daily Assessment.
Market change: The dollar change between accepted market totals on two consecutive calendar-day records. It is derived from the two frozen totals and their record hashes, and carries no attribution to any issuer, chain or currency. In the API it is dailyAggregateChange.deltaUsd.
ODS change: The relative change in Onchain Dollar Share between accepted consecutive calendar-day ODS records, stated in basis points. It is derived independently of Market change, including when the M2 denominator changes. In the API it is odsChange.deltaPct.
Constituent movement: The stored snapshot-to-snapshot change in the individual stablecoins, including gross expansion, gross contraction and, where the evidence supports it, which issuer, chain or currency moved. It is independent of Market change and ODS change. In the API it is movement.
Level-only record: A dated record carrying the accepted supply level and the ODS reading, but no constituent movement. It may still be a valid endpoint for Market change and ODS change.
Withdrawn reading: A reading that was published and later withdrawn. The original remains visible with its withdrawal status and is excluded from the valid benchmark series.
Bootstrap record: An initialisation capture that remains published and tagged, but is excluded from the canonical series, highlights, streaks and default citations.
Record hash: The SHA-256 digest of a canonicalised frozen record. It attests that the stored bytes are unchanged, not that the source figure was right.
Mint: The creation of new stablecoin units, increasing supply in circulation.
Burn: The removal of stablecoin units from circulation, reducing supply.
On-chain: Activity recorded directly on a public blockchain, where anyone can verify it independently.