Outstanding supply

Overview

Outstanding supply measures the circulating supply of stablecoins issued by a project. It excludes stablecoins that have been authorized but not issued, or that are held in the issuer’s treasury. It tends to serve as a proxy for the issuer’s revenue-generation capacity, as the collateral backing the outstanding supply is often invested in yield-bearing assets, such as U.S. Treasuries.

Data sources

• Smart contract events capturing token issuance and redemption
• Token account balances and program instructions for non-EVM chains
• Token metadata for decimal precision and asset identification
• Token price feeds for USD conversion

Common calculation approaches

Event-based issuance tracking

For many stablecoin issuers, cumulative supply is determined by monitoring token issuance and redemption events. Mint and Burn events are extracted from the smart contracts of issuers such as Circle and Ethena to maintain a running total of net supply. Similar logic is applied to Transfer events involving the zero address for issuers like World Liberty Financial to identify changes in the circulating supply.

Balance-based snapshot aggregation

Outstanding supply is also derived from daily snapshots of token holdings across various blockchains. On Solana, the total supply is aggregated from program instructions for issuers like Tether and Circle by summing the balances of all active token accounts. This method allows for the identification of circulating tokens while ensuring that assets held in known treasury or non-circulating addresses are excluded.

Debt-based calculation with exclusions

For issuers with debt-based models, outstanding supply is calculated by identifying total minted debt and subtracting idle balances. For example, total debt is obtained from the debt function in VAT contracts for Sky, with assets held in bridge contracts or lending modules subsequently excluded to arrive at the net circulating amount.

Note: The calculation approaches and protocol examples above are representative patterns. Individual protocol implementations may vary.