The Stablecoin Issuer's Guide to Onchain Intelligence: What to Track and Why
The stablecoin market has exploded to over 400 issued tokens with more than $300 billion in total market cap. Despite all this activity, only a handful of stablecoins have achieved meaningful adoption. The top two—USDT and USDC—continue to dominate market share while hundreds of newer entrants struggle to gain traction.
The reason is straightforward: issuing a stablecoin is now table stakes. The technology is proven, regulatory frameworks are maturing, and infrastructure providers have made launch processes relatively simple. Distribution and liquidity—not issuance—determine which stablecoins succeed.
Building real adoption requires understanding what's actually happening onchain: where your token flows, who holds it, which use cases drive volume, and how you compare to competitors. Without accurate onchain intelligence, issuers are operating blind.
Why Onchain Data Infrastructure Matters for Issuers
Stablecoin issuers face three fundamental challenges once their token launches:
- Institutions require auditable metrics. Major allocators won't commit capital to a stablecoin without reliable data for risk management and compliance reporting. If your supply and volume numbers can't be verified, institutional adoption stalls.
- GTM strategy requires granular visibility. Effective go-to-market means knowing where liquidity concentrates, which protocols drive usage, who your largest holders are, and which chains show momentum. Public, community-maintained dashboards showing total supply don't provide this level of insight.
- Analytics platforms show inconsistent numbers. Most providers aggregate data from multiple sources, leading to discrepancies in reported supply, volume, and holder counts. When your internal metrics don't match what third parties report, explaining performance to stakeholders becomes difficult.
The result: issuers can't optimize distribution strategy, can't hold liquidity partners accountable, and can't benchmark performance accurately. This makes the difference between a stablecoin that gains traction and one that joins the long tail of unused tokens.
Three Core Capabilities Stablecoin Issuers Need
Building effective onchain intelligence starts with three foundational capabilities:
1. Balance & Holder Monitoring
What it tracks: Historical balances at hourly or daily granularity across all chains where your stablecoin operates. This includes current holder distribution, concentration metrics (what percentage of supply the top 100 wallets control), and wallet-level activity patterns.
Why it matters: Understanding holder composition reveals adoption patterns. Are your tokens concentrated in a few large wallets or distributed broadly? Are new holders entering the ecosystem or is growth stagnant? Which wallets are most active, and which are dormant?
What it enables:
- Operational monitoring for compliance and risk management
- GTM targeting—identify whales to convert, active users to engage, and dormant holders to reactivate
- Strategic decisions about where to focus liquidity incentives or partnership efforts
2. Accurate Circulating Supply Tracking
What it tracks: Circulating supply that filters out noise from foundation treasuries, pre-minting addresses, and burned tokens. This provides a clear view of how much of your stablecoin is actually in market circulation across different chains and ecosystems.
Why it matters: Total supply metrics are misleading. If your foundation holds 60% of minted tokens in a treasury wallet, that inflates your apparent market presence. Accurate circulating supply shows real market share and enables meaningful comparisons with competitors.
For multi-chain stablecoins, this becomes critical: seeing which chains drive actual adoption versus which show inflated supply helps prioritize where to invest in ecosystem development.
What it enables:
- Strategic decisions about which chains and ecosystems to prioritize
- Accurate benchmarking against competitors (apples-to-apples comparisons)
- Credible public reporting that builds institutional confidence
3. Enriched Transfer Activity
What it tracks: Stablecoin transfers labeled by economic context—is this a CEX deposit, a DEX swap, a lending protocol interaction, a bridge transaction, or a peer-to-peer transfer? Includes filters to identify and exclude wash trading or circular volume that inflates usage metrics.
Why it matters: Raw transfer volume doesn't distinguish between meaningful economic activity and noise. A million dollars in volume from genuine DEX trading represents real adoption. A million dollars from wash trading or internal protocol movements does not.
Understanding which use cases drive real volume—cross-border payments, DeFi trading, treasury operations, merchant settlements—reveals where your stablecoin has product-market fit and where GTM efforts should focus.
What it enables:
- GTM strategy informed by actual usage patterns (which verticals and protocols to prioritize)
- Liquidity partner accountability (verify market makers are performing as expected)
- Competitive intelligence (how does your usage profile compare to established stablecoins)
What Good Onchain Intelligence Enables
When issuers have access to these three capabilities, several strategic advantages follow:
Build institutional trust. Public dashboards showing auditable, verified metrics demonstrate transparency. Institutions evaluating your stablecoin can verify supply claims, track usage trends, and assess market adoption independently. This credibility accelerates institutional onboarding.
Optimize GTM investment. Rather than spreading resources across all possible integrations, focus on protocols, chains, and user segments where data shows momentum. If one chain shows 10x the transfer activity of another, that signals where to prioritize partnerships and liquidity incentives.
Manage liquidity partners. Market makers and liquidity providers commit to maintaining depth and tight spreads. Tracking their performance across venues—order book depth, slippage, fill rates—ensures they deliver on commitments. Data makes these relationships accountable.
Benchmark competitive position. Understanding your market share across chains, your adoption velocity relative to competitors, and where you're gaining or losing ground informs strategic decisions. Are you winning on Layer 2s but losing on Solana? The data tells you where to adjust strategy.
How USDH Built Public Transparency into Their Launch Strategy
Native Markets launched USDH with a public dashboard built on Allium's data infrastructure.
The dashboard provides real-time transparency into USDH supply across HyperEVM and HyperCore, holder distribution metrics (total active addresses, median and average balances), top holder identification, and spot market volumes showing USDH's market share against other stablecoins. Anyone—users, institutions, or partners—can verify USDH's adoption metrics independently.
Start Building Your Onchain Analytics Strategy
The stablecoin market will continue growing more competitive. Regulatory clarity and improved infrastructure mean more issuers will launch tokens targeting specific use cases, geographies, or customer segments. Success won't come from having the best reserves or compliance framework alone—those become table stakes.
Winners will combine strong distribution strategies with data infrastructure that shows what's working. This means starting with the three core capabilities outlined above: balance and holder monitoring to understand your user base, accurate circulating supply to benchmark market position, and enriched transfer activity to see which use cases drive real adoption.
For issuers launching new stablecoins or scaling existing ones, investing in onchain intelligence infrastructure early creates compounding advantages. The sooner you understand adoption patterns, the faster you can optimize distribution—and the wider the gap between you and competitors still operating blind.
Learn more about how leading stablecoin issuers use onchain data infrastructure: allium.so
Explore fiat-backed stablecoins at Visa Onchain Analytics x Allium
Explore the USDH dashboard built with Allium
