Modeling Stablecoin Activity on Arc
Stablecoin volume on a new chain is easy to overstate. We separate issuer mints, internal settlement and user payments before publishing a number.
Context
token.transfers includes every ERC-20 Transfer. For USDC-class tokens that mix mint, burn, treasury rebalancing and user payment in the same event, raw volume is not activity.
Method
Issuer addresses are listed in protocol.contracts. Transfers where from or to is the issuer are tagged mint/burn. Remaining transfers are candidates for payments.transfers once the semantic layer lands.
Findings
On the Arc blocks we have decoded so far, issuer-side movement accounts for a large share of apparent stablecoin volume. Reporting raw Transfer sums would mislead any TVL or activity dashboard.
Implications for the data model
stablecoin.transfers will carry an activity column rather than a separate mint table. Until that ships, token.transfers is the source of truth and volume charts should not be built from it unfiltered.