Bitcoin onchain transfers vary sixfold in BIS study
A Bank for International Settlements working paper has found that estimates of Bitcoin onchain transfer value can differ by as much as sixfold depending on how researchers treat transaction outputs. The Bank for International Settlements working paper, titled Hidden by complexity? Measuring stablecoin, crypto and decentralised finance ecosystems, was written by Timothy Aerts, Ronald Heijmans, Jan Paulick and Violeta Vuletic and published in September 2026. The research uses data from Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron collected through Mercurius, a project operated by De Nederlandsche Bank and developed with the BIS Innovation Hub and Deutsche Bundesbank. Read BIS Working Paper 1377 Across the three networks, the Mercurius dataset contains 100 billion records. The paper cautions that the figure represents data points stored through its processing system and should not be read as 100 billion distinct blockchain events. Ethereum and Tron records can overlap between base-layer and smart-contract data, while information can appear at several stages of the processing pipeline. Bitcoin onchain transfer estimates depend on change handling For its Bitcoin analysis, the study examined data covering 2009 through 2026, including approximately 1.3 billion transactions and 3.6 billion transaction outputs. Researchers tested three ways of calculating transfer value because Bitcoins unspent transaction output, or UTXO, model can








