Base batches users' transactions and submits them to Ethereum, paying a share of the transaction fees to Ethereum validators (expense).

Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) offering a secure, low-cost, builder-friendly way for anyone, anywhere, to build onchain.

Coinbase team owns and governs the protocol. Coinbase is a public company and its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Vanguard Group, ARK Investment Management, etc.

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# Base USDC outstanding supply Methodology

## 1. Overview

USDC outstanding supply measures the total amount of USDC tokens currently in circulation on the Base blockchain. This metric answers the question "How much USDC exists and is available for use on Base?" The calculation tracks the running balance of USDC by monitoring Circle protocol's mint and burn operations, where mints add new tokens to circulation and burns remove tokens from circulation.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation uses several key data sources:
- **Circle protocol events**: Parsed `USDC_Mint_event` and `USDC_Burn_event` logs from the Circle v1 protocol deployed on Base blockchain, capturing all official USDC creation and destruction operations
- **Base blockchain data**: Block timestamps and transaction metadata from Base network to establish timing and context for mint/burn events
- **End-of-day price feeds**: Token price data for USD conversion of USDC amounts
- **Token metadata**: USDC token contract information including decimal places for proper amount calculation

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: USDC mint tracking
- **Purpose**: Captures all new USDC tokens created and added to circulation on Base
- **Logic**: Extracts `USDC_Mint_event` logs from Circle protocol contracts on Base. Each mint event contains the `amount` of new USDC tokens created. Events are filtered to ensure they come from official Circle protocol sources and include all necessary transaction metadata like `block_timestamp`, `transaction_hash`, and `log_index` for proper tracking
- **Key fields**: `amount` (raw mint amount), `token_address` (USDC contract), `block_timestamp` (when minting occurred), transaction identifiers for deduplication

### Component B: USDC burn tracking  
- **Purpose**: Captures all USDC tokens removed from circulation on Base
- **Logic**: Extracts `USDC_Burn_event` logs from Circle protocol contracts on Base. Each burn event contains the `amount` of USDC tokens destroyed. The burn amounts are treated as negative values to represent supply reduction when combined with mint data
- **Key fields**: `amount` (raw burn amount, negated), `token_address` (USDC contract), `block_timestamp` (when burning occurred), transaction identifiers for deduplication

### Component C: Supply change calculation
- **Purpose**: Combines mint and burn operations to calculate net daily supply changes
- **Logic**: Mint events are treated as positive supply changes while burn events are treated as negative supply changes (burn amounts are negated). All operations are aggregated daily by truncating `block_timestamp` to day boundaries and summing the net `amount` changes. This produces a daily time series of supply deltas
- **Key fields**: Daily aggregated `outstanding_delta` (net supply change per day), `timestamp` (day-level), chain and token identifiers

### Component D: Cumulative supply calculation
- **Purpose**: Converts daily supply changes into running outstanding supply totals
- **Logic**: Applies a cumulative sum window function over the daily supply changes, ordered by date and partitioned by chain and token address. This creates a running total that represents the outstanding USDC supply at each point in time. The calculation assumes zero initial supply and builds the total from historical mint/burn operations
- **Key fields**: `outstanding_supply` (cumulative total), maintaining time series continuity

### Component E: Time series completion
- **Purpose**: Ensures continuous daily time series without gaps
- **Logic**: Forward-fills the outstanding supply values to cover any missing days in the time series. This ensures the metric has a value for every day, maintaining the last known supply amount when no mint or burn operations occurred
- **Key fields**: Gap-filled `outstanding_supply` with complete daily coverage

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: The daily outstanding supply values flow through USD conversion and decimal correction processes
- **Currency conversion**: USDC amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day price feeds, with proper decimal adjustment to account for USDC's 6 decimal places
- **Time aggregation**: Data maintains daily granularity with timestamp boundaries set at day level
- **Final calculation**: The result represents the total USDC outstanding supply on Base at each day, expressed in USD terms with proper decimal normalization and zero-fill strategy applied for any remaining data gaps

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Base

USDC outstanding supply

USDC outstanding supply

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