Why $USDC transfers can outnumber payments
Aerodrome is a decentralized exchange on Base, the blockchain network developed by Coinbase. Traders use its liquidity pools to swap tokens, while liquidity providers deposit assets that support those trades. Aerodrome’s documentation says eligible providers can receive AERO token rewards, with allocations to pools determined through weekly voting.
In one-tick farming, a liquidity provider uses a very narrow price range for a position. As positions are managed, $USDC can move through pool contracts repeatedly. RyeBlocks’ finding concerns the resulting transfer records: the value counted as moving onchain can rise each time the tokens change position, even when the activity does not represent a new purchase or a payment to another person.
Aerodrome says it launched on Aug. 28, 2023, and uses a concentrated-liquidity design called Slipstream alongside another type of liquidity pool. Its rewards system gives providers a reason to place funds in eligible pools. RyeBlocks has identified farming within that system as the source of most of the $USDC volume in its Sep. 23 comparison.
The finding does not, by itself, show wrongdoing by Aerodrome or its users. Providing liquidity is a normal exchange activity. The measurement question is whether a headline transfer total tells readers how many dollars people used for payments, or whether it mainly counts repeated movements connected to trading and liquidity management.
A separate measure shows why the distinction matters on Base. In September, Aerodrome handled $557.1 million of tokenized-stock trades during a 30-day period, or 76% of that category’s volume on the network, according to Token Terminal figures previously covered by crypto.news. That measure counted completed swaps. RyeBlocks’ $USDC figures concern token transfers, so the two totals describe different types of activity and should not be combined.
How stablecoin data providers separate the activity
Visa’s Onchain Analytics Dashboard draws a distinction between total stablecoin volume and an adjusted measure. Visa says public blockchains record activity initiated both by people and by software, including transactions that do not resemble conventional settlement. Its adjusted methodology seeks to remove potential distortions from bots, high-frequency trading, routing and repeated internal movements within a transaction.
Visa and its data partner Allium also classify transfers by use. The dashboard distinguishes payments for goods, services or person-to-person transfers from decentralized finance, exchange flows, trading and other categories. A $USDC transfer into a liquidity pool can therefore be recorded onchain without being classified as a consumer or business payment.
The adjusted figure is not a simple count of payments, either. Visa says some DeFi activity can appear in adjusted volume, depending on how a transfer is classified and whether it passes the dashboard’s filters. Its methodology also uses address labels and transaction thresholds, which means results depend on the rules used to sort the data.
Dune describes a similar need to identify what a transfer represents. Its stablecoin data can classify activity such as a decentralized-exchange swap, a lending deposit, or a bridge transfer. Dune says users can choose which categories to include when calculating adjusted volume, rather than relying on one formula for every purpose.
Circle’s $USDC figures cover several uses
For U.S. investors following Circle, the issuer of $USDC, the difference between transfer volume and payments is relevant to how company activity figures are read. Circle reported $14.8 trillion in $USDC onchain transaction volume for the second quarter of 2026, up 151% from a year earlier. As earlier coverage of Circle’s results noted, that total includes trading and transfers alongside payments. It is a quarterly, company-reported measure and is not directly comparable with RyeBlocks’ single-day estimate.
Circle has also reported a narrower payments figure. Its second-quarter results put $USDC at 99.3% of the payment volume it measured through x402, a protocol that lets software pay for online services. The percentage applies to that protocol’s measured activity, not to all payments made with $USDC.
In August, Bernstein used another measure when assessing Circle. The brokerage said adjusted stablecoin volume was running at an annualized rate of about $17 trillion through July, with its calculation excluding bots and high-frequency activity. That estimate covers stablecoins generally and uses a different period and method from the figures RyeBlocks reported.
Circle’s planned expansion into payments provides a separate point of comparison. In September, the company agreed to buy payments firm Tazapay for $400 million in stock. Circle said Tazapay processes more than $25 billion in annualized payment volume across payout routes spanning over 100 markets, with stablecoins involved in about 60% of its transaction volume. The deal remains subject to approvals, including clearance from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
