BIS Report Reveals Significant Variance in Cryptocurrency Metrics

A recent working paper from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has highlighted the potential for misleading cryptocurrency and decentralized finance activity indicators due to variations in how raw blockchain data are cleaned and interpreted.

The researchers drew on roughly 100 billion records from Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tron, concluding that widely cited metrics of transfer volume, market size, and on-chain usage are highly sensitive to these factors.

For Bitcoin, the unspent-transaction-output model means that a typical payment often returns unused funds as change, with estimates differing by up to six times depending on whether this change is counted, excluded, or treated under a conservative rule.

Ethereum presents different challenges due to its programmability, which allows a single transaction to trigger many contracts and emit numerous events. The researchers classified 13 million active contracts but found tens of millions that defied straightforward categorization.