Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx said it will cease operations, citing the “increasingly difficult” conditions of running a crypto exchange.

CoinEx users have until Dec. 22 to withdraw their funds, when the exchange will formally close, nine years to the day after it went live, founder and CEO Haipo Yang wrote on X Tuesday.

“CoinEx did not become one of the industry’s leading exchanges and the security and compliance risks of running a crypto exchange have become increasingly difficult to contain,” Yang said.

He added that he did consider selling CoinEx, but did not feel that would be “the right way to end this journey. A clean ending is the right ending.”

ConEx’s 24-hour trading volume sits at just over $70 million, according to CoinGecko, some way short of leading Asia-based exchanges like CoinW ($1.18 billion) and Gate ($1.6 billion).

The closure reflects a trend of well-established exchanges struggling to maintain their place in the market as the industry matures and consolidates. Bitmart and BitMEX, which had been around since 2017 and 2014, respectively, both announced their closures in July, with indications that they were casualties of a decline in spot trading volume by retail users.

An attacker exploited a Gnosis Safe wallet on Ethereum, removing about 2,900 rsETH, worth roughly $7.8 million, on Tuesday.

An automated bot known as “yoink” front-ran the attack transaction and extracted the tokens, security firms BlockSec, Blockaid and SlowMist said.

The victim’s wallet was set up to let a helper contract move money for it, an ordinary arrangement for people who automate their trading. The helper was meant to verify that the caller had permission, but SlowMist and BlockSec found the check approved anyone who named the helper itself as the target.

The attacker then dumped around 2,900 rsETH into a trading pool built minutes earlier around a worthless token called Permissionless Attacker Token, leaving the wallet with a receipt worth nothing. Yoink’s bot paid roughly $47,000 to jump the queue and took the tokens, sending 2,882 rsETH to a separate address.

A rally that carried bitcoin to $79,427 on Monday unwound on Tuesday, leaving the largest cryptocurrency at $76,862, down 1.7% since midnight UTC and 6.6% below the month’s $82,284 high set on Sept. 4. Ether fell 1.6% to $2,474.76 and solana (SOL) lost 2% at $100.43.

Polymarket odds on the U.S. Clarity Act being signed into law this year followed a similar trajectory, reaching 34% on Monday before sliding back to 17%. The drop was caused by news that Democrats had crafted a counterproposal after rejecting a revised draft Republican negotiators circulated on Sunday. The sticking point is the ethics language governing officials’ crypto holdings rather than the market structure provisions themselves.

The Senate votes at 2:15 p.m. ET on whether to invoke cloture, or force a vote, on the bill. If the bill passes, that would move the industry closer to its first clear set of U.S. rules on who regulates what. A failure would likely shelve market structure legislation until after the midterm elections in November.

Selling pressure was near universal on Tuesday, with 92 of the CoinDesk 100 constituents lower on the day and the index itself down 1.6%.

When the legislative talks picked up pace again, it was already late in the congressional session, with lobbyists and lawmakers well aware that the election was looming that would make it harder to secure bipartisan legislative work. All along, the ethics question stood as the center of debate and the aspect that needed to be ironed out if the rest were to proceed.

In that process, President Trump agreed to concessions twice, including a second batch of changes over the weekend. But judging from the sentiments from Gallego, one of the chief Democratic negotiators on this point, it wasn’t nearly enough.

“All President Trump wants is for the Senate to give him time to crime, and I won’t support any piece of legislation that enables him,” the Arizona senator said.

During the negotiations, Gallego and other Democrats had to turn their backs on Senator Elizabeth Warren, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, who favored strong opposition to Clarity. She kept up that view, continually underlining the crypto ties between Trump and the crypto industry from which he earned more than a billion dollars during the first year of his second term.

“I believe we can get crypto legislation that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on. But not this bill,” she said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “This bill will turbocharge Donald Trump’s unprecedented corruption.”

Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements found that estimates of Bitcoin onchain transfer values can vary by as much as sixfold depending on how transactions are measured.

The finding concerns onchain Bitcoin transfer values, rather than trading volume on crypto exchanges. The sixfold gap reflects differences between measurement methods, including how change outputs and other transfers back to the sender are treated.

The discrepancy stems largely from Bitcoin’s transaction structure. When users spend Bitcoin, unspent funds are often returned to the sender as change, which can be counted as another output even though it does not represent funds being transferred to another party.

Breakdown of blockchain records analyzed in the BIS study. Source: BIS

“Metrics such as transaction volumes, market capitalisation and total value locked often suggest a degree of accuracy that is not supported by the nature of the underlying data,” the researchers wrote.

The measurement problem also extends to Bitcoin’s market capitalization. The researchers found that the conventional measure has at times been as much as four times higher than realized capitalization, which values each coin at the price when it last moved.

The study, based on 100 billion blockchain records across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron, found that similar measurement challenges extend across the broader crypto ecosystem.

Related: Stablecoins not credible for payments at scale, BIS chief says

Ethereum and stablecoins present additional challenges

Ethereum presented a separate measurement challenge because of the proliferation of smart contracts. Of roughly 67.5 million active contracts examined, about 54 million could not be categorized using the classifications in the study.

Interpreting stablecoin activity presents another challenge, as the same asset can serve different purposes across blockchains. USDT on Ethereum was more closely linked to DeFi activity, while USDT on Tron was associated more with payment-like and store-of-value purposes.

The differences were particularly stark in smart contract holdings. The share of USDT held by smart contracts on Ethereum exceeded 20% in 2022, compared with around 1% on Tron. Because of the different use cases, the researchers said aggregating USDT activity across blockchains can conflate different types of economic activity and obscure how stablecoins are actually being used.

The BIS researchers concluded that onchain indicators should be treated as “noisy approximations rather than direct measures of economic activity.”

Visa filters stablecoin data to reflect economic activity

Some analytics providers already distinguish between raw blockchain activity and adjusted measures intended to better represent economic activity.

Visa’s Onchain Analytics dashboard, powered by data from Allium Labs, displays both total and adjusted stablecoin transaction volumes. Visa says its adjusted methodology aims to remove potential distortions from activity including high-frequency trading, bots, bridge routing and internal exchange operations.

The dashboard currently shows $6.4 trillion in total stablecoin transaction volume across the networks it tracks over the past 30 days, compared with $313.1 billion in adjusted volume.

Stablecoin transaction volumes. Source: Visa Onchain Analytics

New research from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) suggests many of the headline metrics used to describe crypto activity—especially onchain “transfer” values—can be misleading depending on how the underlying blockchain data is counted. The BIS team reports that estimates of Bitcoin transfer values can differ by as much as six times when measurement methods change, driven largely by how transaction outputs are interpreted.

The study also highlights broader problems across the crypto ecosystem, extending beyond Bitcoin to Ethereum and stablecoins. BIS researchers warn that onchain indicators should often be treated as “noisy approximations rather than direct measures of economic activity,” rather than precision readouts of real-world flows.

Key takeaways

• Bitcoin onchain transfer values can swing by up to 6x based on how outputs—such as change back to the sender—are counted.
• Common market-cap style measures may overstate realized value; BIS finds conventional capitalization has at times been up to 4x higher.
• Ethereum’s smart-contract environment complicates classification, with tens of millions of active contracts that BIS could not categorize using the study’s framework.
• Stablecoin activity varies by chain and purpose, so aggregating across networks can blur how USDT is actually used.
• Some analytics providers already adjust raw volumes to remove distortions tied to behaviors like internal exchange routing or bot-driven activity.

Why “transfer value” can mean very different things

In the BIS working paper, the researchers focus on a measurement gap: when analysts try to estimate how much Bitcoin is being transferred onchain, the result depends heavily on the rules used to parse transactions. BIS’s key point is not that onchain data is absent, but that the same data can produce drastically different “economic activity” estimates.

The sixfold discrepancy reported by BIS is tied to differences in transaction measurement methods. One major driver is Bitcoin’s transaction structure. When a user spends Bitcoin, the transaction often includes unspent funds returned to the sender as a “change” output. Depending on the methodology, that change can be counted as an additional output—despite not representing value sent to another party.

BIS argues that this kind of counting convention can create the appearance of greater transfers than what actually reflects third-party movement. The researchers underline that metrics frequently presented as straightforward—such as transaction volumes, market capitalization, and total value locked—may carry more certainty than the structure of the underlying data actually supports.

Bitcoin market capitalization: a similar measurement mismatch

The BIS paper extends the measurement theme beyond transfer values to capitalization. The researchers report that a conventional market-cap approach has, at times, been as much as four times higher than realized capitalization.

According to BIS, realized capitalization values each coin at the price at the time it last moved. That distinction matters because it ties the valuation method to activity timestamps, rather than assuming a single uniform pricing snapshot. The implication for investors and market observers is that onchain-linked metrics can diverge from how value is actually being reflected in usage—especially when measurement assumptions are treated as neutral.

Cross-chain complications: Ethereum classification and stablecoin aggregation

While Bitcoin’s transaction design creates ambiguity around change outputs, Ethereum presents a different kind of complexity: smart contracts. BIS examined roughly 67.5 million active contracts and found that about 54 million could not be categorized using the classifications used in the study.

This matters because any attempt to interpret stablecoin flows or onchain transfers often depends on understanding whether activity belongs to known contract patterns—such as decentralized finance interactions, custody, payment services, or other use cases. When classification fails at scale, the risk increases that analytics will treat diverse behaviors as if they were homogeneous.

Stablecoins add another layer. The BIS researchers note that the same asset can serve different functions across networks. In their observations, USDT on Ethereum was more closely tied to DeFi activity, while USDT on Tron showed stronger association with payment-like and store-of-value purposes. BIS further highlights that the split is visible in smart contract holdings: in 2022, the share of USDT held by smart contracts on Ethereum exceeded 20%, compared with around 1% on Tron.

The practical takeaway is that aggregating stablecoin activity across chains can conflate distinct economic behaviors. BIS frames the resulting indicators as approximations that may obscure how stablecoins are being used in practice.

Overall, BIS’s conclusion is that onchain indicators should be approached as noisy estimates rather than direct measurements of economic activity—particularly when the indicators are presented as if they map cleanly to real-world transfers.

Adjusted analytics: how some dashboards try to correct distortions

Not all analytics treat raw blockchain activity as a final truth. Some providers attempt to separate “raw” transaction counts from adjusted volumes designed to better represent underlying economic activity.

Visa’s Onchain Analytics dashboard—powered by data from Allium Labs—shows both total and adjusted stablecoin transaction volumes. The dashboard’s adjusted methodology is intended to remove distortions from activity that may not reflect broad economic transfer, including high-frequency trading, bots, bridge routing, and internal exchange operations.

On the dashboard, Visa reports $6.4 trillion in total stablecoin transaction volume across the networks it tracks over the past 30 days, versus $313.1 billion in adjusted volume. The size of that gap illustrates the central theme of the BIS study: depending on counting rules and filtering approaches, “activity” can look dramatically larger or smaller.

Importantly, this does not automatically validate any specific methodology as “correct.” Instead, it reinforces BIS’s broader warning: without careful definitions and adjustments, common onchain metrics can overstate what the data actually means for economic interpretation.

For readers tracking crypto adoption using onchain indicators, the key next step is to pay closer attention to methodology—especially whether metrics account for change outputs, smart-contract classification limits, chain-specific usage patterns, and filtering for bot-driven or internal operations. BIS’s findings suggest that as dashboards and analytics products mature, the real differentiator will be how transparently they define what they measure and how their measurement choices shape the numbers.