90% of Ethereum, Tron, Solana Stablecoin Transactions Are ‘Inorgranic Activity’, Visa Says

Smart contracts, not humans, are driving nearly all stablecoin arbitrage, liquidity provision, and market making.

Nearly all stablecoin transactions are tied to “inorganic activity,” according to payments giant Visa and enterprise blockchain data provider Allium.

The companies have launched a new data dashboard designed “to remove potential distortions that can arise from inorganic activity and other artificial inflationary practices,” and its adjusted figures reveal upwards of 90% of tracked transactions occur without human involvement.

The dashboard tracks Tether's eponymous USDT, Circle's USDC, Paxos's USDP, and PayPal's PYUSD. All of them are pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar and keep cash or cash-like (U.S. treasury bonds) reserves to back their tokens. Visa doesn't attribute the "inorganic activity" to any particular stablecoin, but comparing the adjusted and unadjusted figures casts a stark light on just how infrequently humans are the ones initiating stablecoin payments.

For example, Visa reports that $51.6 billion worth of stablecoin transactions were processed on Sunday, May 5. That's the unadjusted figure. When the data is adjusted to remove so-called inorganic activity, the number plummets to $4.6 billion.