Methodology

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 rounded translation of that percentage for readability, derived from the same rounded figure rather than recalculated from raw data, so the two readings can never disagree. A raw, unrounded reciprocal value is never used as a headline figure.

Companion comparisons may use other denominators. They are labelled separately on the Metrics register and never replace the headline 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 terminology boundary use Onchain Dollar Share and ods-v1. Legacy DDD machine identifiers may remain for compatibility; they identify this same benchmark series, not a different benchmark.

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

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., as specified by the Federal Reserve’s own methodology, and it excludes much of the dollar-denominated financial system. Onchain Dollar Share is therefore a share of that aggregate, not a share of all dollars in existence and not a share of every dollar held globally. A reading of roughly one and a third per cent means USD stablecoin supply equals about that fraction of U.S. M2, and nothing wider.

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 uses the most recent published observation available at the time it is served.

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 the next M2 observation 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. A genuine FRED release and vintage data contract is a precondition for any such claim, and none is in place.

Freshness is not fetch time. These are three different claims and Stable Tape keeps them apart. Observation time is when the upstream source itself last measured the value. Retrieval time is when Stable Tape last read it. Cache window is how long a served response may be reused: the public benchmark endpoints carry a five-minute edge cache. A five-minute cache does not mean supply is measured every five minutes, and 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.

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.

Official daily cutoff

12:00 UTC

Record window

Snapshot to snapshot

Numerator cadence

Continuous upstream

Denominator cadence

Monthly

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 marked withdrawn. Stable Tape does not fill, carry forward, or silently close these states.

The 12:00 UTC 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, Movement is unavailable because Stable Tape never steps over that date and relabels a multi-day difference as a daily move. A constituent evidence failure is different: it can withhold the constituent breakdown without suppressing Movement.

Movement. This is the primary daily change shown to readers. In the API it is the dailyAggregateChange object. It is available only when accepted records exist on consecutive calendar dates and both records carry a valid market total. Full and level-only records are equally valid endpoints. A missing, withdrawn, unavailable or non-consecutive endpoint makes Movement unavailable. The derived representation binds both record dates and hashes and validates the subtraction and percentage again before publication.

Constituent breakdown. The existing movement object answers a different question: what the resolved stablecoin rows did between eligible source snapshots, including gross expansion, gross contraction and any guarded issuer, chain or currency attribution. It can be unavailable while Movement remains available. Movement is never used as issuer, chain, currency, mint or burn attribution.

“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.

A candidate freezes automatically only after its source representation, timestamp, row reconciliation and discontinuity checks pass. Malformed or unreconciled source data is unavailable; a material aggregate, constituent, newly unmapped or apparently erroneous discontinuity requires accountable human review. A reviewed genuine observation remains publishable with its review result bound to the candidate 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 stores null constituent movement fields and produces no Daily Assessment or alert. Primary Movement is derived separately from immutable accepted record totals, so adding it does not rewrite either frozen record. Every record is written once and is not overwritten.

Constituent movement is the observed difference between two eligible source snapshots. It is not primary Movement, it is not a transaction-level mint and burn feed, and it does not claim to know when within the window a change occurred.

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 noon snapshot pair was unavailable, the date is published as a declared gap rather than closed up, estimated or backfilled.

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.

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 serialised through a fixed canonicalisation and hashed with SHA-256. The digest, the algorithm, the canonicalisation and the time it 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 highest-priority eligible family becomes the Daily Assessment. Eligibility includes the thresholds, cooldowns, repetition controls, attribution checks and data-quality guards below; meeting one numerical condition does not bypass them.

1. Record validity. Incomplete, bootstrap and non-canonical records are flagged before any market reading is attempted.
2. 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.
3. Archive extreme. A record-level daily extreme requires at least 30 canonical records. Until the archive reaches 90 records, the headline states its size.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Large daily movement. Net supply movement of at least $1B becomes the day’s large-move reading.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. Quiet reading. Absolute net movement at or below 0.05% of supply becomes the fallback only after stronger families and offsetting movement are tested.
14. 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 retained where the selected family’s evidence template supports it; rolling supply trends retain that context in the record’s Daily Assessment metrics instead of appending a third comparison to the public evidence line. Missing dates and flat records break directional runs.

Guarded attribution: 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.

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.

Drafts and distribution. Stable Tape also generates operator-facing research candidates from the same frozen record, evaluating ODS movement, net and offsetting supply movement, issuer, chain and asset changes, reversals, streaks, historical rank, new tracked listings, leaderboard changes and external money-supply milestones. Stablecoin Velocity is evaluated as research too, and can never select the Daily Assessment. The published post for a canonical day always carries the frozen Daily Assessment verbatim — the same headline shown on the dated record — with its evidence line and dated permalink. A draft that does not match the frozen Daily Assessment word for word is blocked from posting.

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

Production Daily Assessment v5, documented above, is the current public methodology. Every Daily Assessment published today is selected by v5 rules and phrased by v5 templates.

A candidate successor, Signal v6, exists as operator-only research. It is a deterministic replay over the same frozen canonical records, exploring a different way of describing a day: whether an observation is a new condition, a materially strengthened existing condition, a state change, a continuation or no new Signal.

Not live. Signal v6 does not select, phrase or influence any published Daily Assessment. It creates no field on any record, publishes nothing, and alters no frozen byte. No candidate result is published, and the existence of an unfinished engine is not a reason to show one.

Before any release. Candidate work requires calibration against the archive, a methodology freeze, versioning carried in the record, and a separate implementation review for the schema, the website, the cards and the publishing path. Until those are complete and this page is updated to describe a frozen v6 methodology, v5 remains the only public Daily Assessment methodology.

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.

Issuer and chain classification. Which supply sits on which chain comes from the upstream pegged-asset dataset. Issuer is not an upstream field: each pegged asset is labelled from a Stable Tape symbol mapping, falling back to the source asset name, so the grouping stays close to one row per pegged asset and an issuer’s separate stablecoins generally appear as separate rows. When the upstream dataset or the mapping changes, the shares change with it on the next refresh. That is also 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.

• 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.

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. Reading the record for that date is a vintage observation. They answer different questions, 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.

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. The stored snapshot identifiers on each record identify exactly which two observations the movement figure compares.

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.

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 latest available FRED M2SL value.

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?

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.