Visa Stablecoin Volume Adjustment Sparks Questions Over Payment Trends

Visa recently updated its adjusted stablecoin volume measure in its Onchain Analytics tool. The adjustment reflects changes to how recorded activity is classified, rather than any change in payment trends themselves.

The revised classification added heuristics for short-term routing and changed how organic and payment activity is identified. This led to a fuller set of address labels and revised filters, which grew the underlying Allium identity set from about 15 million labeled addresses to roughly 600 million.

Visa's definition of adjusted volume remained the same: it aims to exclude labeled exchanges, contracts, bots, bridges, other infrastructure, and minting and burning. With more addresses identified, more transfers now fall outside the adjusted measure.

The updated methodology still separates payments from DeFi, centralized-exchange flows, investment and trading, store of value, minting and burning, short-term routing, infrastructure and other categories. A transfer can be included in adjusted activity without being classified as a payment; the two labels are not interchangeable.