Market Cap / Stablecoin Supply Hosted

Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a fixed value against a reference such as the US dollar, and most of the dollar-denominated activity on general-purpose chains happens in them. This ratio divides the market capitalization of a chain's native token by the total stablecoin supply resident on that chain. The reasoning behind it is that hosted stablecoin balances proxy for settled commercial demand for blockspace, independent of speculation in the native token itself.

How it is computed

circulating market capitalization of the chain's native token / total stablecoin supply resident on that chain

Where it misleads

Natively issued stablecoins and bridged wrapped versions of the same stablecoin are counted differently by different providers, and a bridged balance can be double-counted against its origin chain. A single issuer can mint or redeem a very large amount on one chain overnight for its own treasury or market-making reasons, with no change in end-user demand on that chain. Balances parked in one exchange's hot wallet are indistinguishable from widely distributed balances held by many users. Chains with little stablecoin presence produce extreme or undefined values, and the metric says nothing at all about assets without a stablecoin ecosystem.

The equity comparison, and why it fails

Price to deposits, as applied to banks. The analogy fails because a bank owes its deposits and earns a spread on them, while a chain neither owns, owes, nor earns anything on stablecoins that happen to be recorded in its ledger.

Reading a high or a low value

A high value means the native token's market capitalization is large relative to the stablecoin balances hosted; a low value means the reverse. Because issuers can relocate supply between chains rapidly, the figure describes present distribution rather than a settled property of the chain.