# Method

## Terms
- **Issuer:** the legal entity that mints and redeems the coin.
- **Supply, circulating:** coins held outside the issuer, as reported by the named source.
- **Supply, on-chain:** `totalSupply()` read from the token contract at a stated block.
- **Covered supply:** on-chain supply summed over the chains we pull holders for. Supply-location shares are shares of covered supply.
- **Corridor:** a payment route between two currencies. **Local-to-local** means neither side is USD and no USD stablecoin sits in the middle.
- **RWA cash leg:** the coin is used to pay for, or settle, a tokenized real-world asset such as a bill, bond, deposit, invoice or loan.

## Playbooks
Each coin gets one primary playbook and up to two secondary ones. A tag needs public evidence. Without evidence the field says "not evidenced".

| Tag | Playbook | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| A | Licence-first institutional | Regulated issuer, sells to banks, treasuries and B2B settlement |
| B | Corridor / remittance | PSP and cross-border partners, one or two named corridors |
| C | Exchange-captive | A local exchange issues or backs the coin to own its on/off-ramp and trading pairs |
| D | Chain-subsidised | A blockchain foundation funds liquidity, gas or grants |
| E | RWA cash leg | The coin settles tokenized deposits, bonds, invoices or loans |
| F | Consumer wallet | Distribution through a retail payments or savings app |

## Status: has the issuer figured it out?
- **Yes:** licence, named distribution at scale, and a revenue model that the issuer discloses or that the evidence shows.
- **Partly:** some of these are in place, or they are in place but the coin is small.
- **No:** missing most of them, dormant, or frozen.
- **n/a:** not launched or dead.

## Supply rules
- DefiLlama's list endpoint (`/stablecoins`) reports non-USD coins in USD value, even though the fields are named `peggedEUR`, `peggedJPY` and so on. We use the per-coin endpoint (`/stablecoin/{id}`) for native units.
- When sources disagree, the card shows each number with its source and basis.
- On-chain shares and aggregator "circulating" figures are never mixed in one table.

## Supply location
Where supply sits shows which demand a coin serves, as opposed to what its marketing claims.

1. Read `totalSupply()` and every holder's `balanceOf()` at one block per chain, from free public RPCs.
2. Pull the top holders from the Blockscout API v2.
3. Label each holder from Blockscout public tags, verified contract names, or `data/labels.json`. Each label records its source.
4. Sort holders into buckets: exchange, DeFi, RWA, PSP/payments, issuer treasury, bridge/escrow, other labelled, unlabelled, and long tail (holders outside the pulled list).

Known limits:
- Holder caches are stale on some chains (Base summed to over 170% of supply). We never use cached balances.
- Solana, BNB Chain and Kaia have no free holder source. They are listed as uncovered.
- Institutional and corridor holders usually sit in unlabelled wallets. The method can show an exchange-captive coin clearly. It cannot confirm a licence-first or corridor coin.
- An exchange that belongs to the issuer's group can hold issuer working capital. Those cases are noted on the card.

## Refresh
- Supply location: daily at 06:00 Jakarta time (WIB, UTC+7), by script. Snapshot files are named by WIB date. Each file also records the block number and block time (UTC) per chain.
- Cards: quarterly by hand, plus on major events. Each card shows its as-of date.

## Out of scope
- Commodity-backed tokens priced in a local currency are not fiat stablecoins and are not on the map. Example: GOIDR (Indonesia), where 1 token is 1 gram of gold held at Pegadaian. Its card is kept at `issuers/goidr.md` so it is not mistaken for an IDR coin.

## Country notes
- **Indonesia:** Bank Indonesia regulation PBI 18/40/2016 prohibits payment system operators from processing virtual currency transactions. Crypto assets have been supervised by OJK since 2025. IDR stablecoins in this map are described from their public materials and on-chain data. We do not assess compliance.