What a swap volume counts, and what it leaves out
These figures measure swaps — value crossing a decentralised-exchange pool. The stablecoin transfer series measures something else: value moving between wallets. A swap also emits transfers, so the two overlap by construction. They are published beside each other and must never be added together.
A swap has two sides, and this project prices only Latin American stablecoins. Volume is therefore measured on the local-currency leg: the BRZ in a BRZ/USDC trade, at its own amount, converted at Brazil's official rate. The other side is never valued — no price is held for it, and taking one from the trade itself would make this series depend on the very thing it is trying to measure.
Where a trade has a tracked token on both sides, each token is credited with the value it traded, but the currency and chain totals count it once. Otherwise a single BRZ-for-BRLA trade would appear twice under one currency. That is 6,416 trades, and every one of them has the same currency on both sides.
The unit counted is the swap, not the transaction: a router splitting one order across several pools produces several swaps, and there are 1.31 of them per transaction. Average swap size is the volume divided by that count, computed here rather than in the browser — an average is not additive, so a reader cannot get the figure for Brazil by averaging the figures for its three tokens.
The window is not the window of the transfer charts. Swap decoding began at different times on each chain — base in August 2025, bnb in December, Ethereum in January 2026, five more in February, and polygon only from June 2026, while polygon's transfers reach back to March 2023. Each chain publishes from its own start rather than the whole series being cut back to the latest of them, so any cross-chain total before June 2026 is one without polygon.
It is a floor twice over. Centralised exchanges do not appear on chain at all, and the Stellar and XRP ledgers both run order books this database does not yet record — Stellar's is the same book that prices the yield-bearing tokens elsewhere on this site. An absent venue reads as no volume, and is not.
TESOURO and CETES are excluded here as they are from the transfer series, and reported at the yield-bearing view. They do trade, and that trading is exactly what measures their yield — but a yield-bearing unit is not a one-to-one claim on its currency and cannot be summed into a payment-stablecoin total.