Scoresby's instinct is right. That Artemis number is gross on-chain volume, which double counts every MEV bot loop, CEX-to-CEX reshuffle, and stablecoin-to-stablecoin bridge hop. Visa ran an adjusted-volume dashboard with Allium back in 2023 that stripped out the bot churn, and organic stablecoin volume came in around 10% of the headline figure. Call it roughly $700B vs $7.2T.
ACH's $6.8T is net settlement after operators net everything down. Two different measurement primitives stacked in the same chart. Normalize both to gross transfer and ACH is an order of magnitude bigger. Normalize both to real economic settlement and stables are probably a tenth the size Artemis claims.
Doesn't kill the thesis. The Triffin-style observation that the cypherpunk stack ended up denominated in USD and funding Treasuries holds either way. But the "surpassed ACH" line is almost certainly wrong in any apples-to-apples frame.
Scoresby's instinct is right. That Artemis number is gross on-chain volume, which double counts every MEV bot loop, CEX-to-CEX reshuffle, and stablecoin-to-stablecoin bridge hop. Visa ran an adjusted-volume dashboard with Allium back in 2023 that stripped out the bot churn, and organic stablecoin volume came in around 10% of the headline figure. Call it roughly $700B vs $7.2T.
ACH's $6.8T is net settlement after operators net everything down. Two different measurement primitives stacked in the same chart. Normalize both to gross transfer and ACH is an order of magnitude bigger. Normalize both to real economic settlement and stables are probably a tenth the size Artemis claims.
Doesn't kill the thesis. The Triffin-style observation that the cypherpunk stack ended up denominated in USD and funding Treasuries holds either way. But the "surpassed ACH" line is almost certainly wrong in any apples-to-apples frame.