Research
Definitions first, figures second
Studies published under the company name. Several public studies of stablecoin enforcement report figures that contradict each other, and almost all of the contradiction comes from measuring different things without saying so. Every study here ships its statistical definitions alongside its result, so that the next person can disagree with the definition rather than with the number.
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Ready · pending release
2026-08-24
The execution window, quarter by quarter
A quarterly series of the interval between the on-chain initiation and the on-chain execution of stablecoin enforcement actions, aggregated across issuers, with its definitions fixed before any slice was computed. Under most readings the aggregate median falls by more than half, by 56% to 98% across seven calibrations, while a growing share of executions leave no measurable window.
- Window
- 2024 Q1 through 2026 Q3, the most recent complete calendar quarter at the 2026-10-19 cutoff. UTC calendar quarters; a quarter enters the series only once it is complete.
- Population
- Executed enforcement actions that immobilise funds, read from public chain data and aggregated across the issuers and assets in the study population. No per-issuer, per-asset or per-chain series is produced at any point in this study.
- Exclusions
- Executions with no measurable on-chain initiation (counted separately, never as a zero interval); releases and reversals of earlier actions; reverted transactions; pauses and upgrades that are not target-specific; test networks; restrictions applied off chain. The incomplete 2026 Q4 is not a slice of the series.
- Reproducible by an outside reader
- No
Why published figures disagree
The disagreement is real, and it is almost entirely definitional
Public estimates of how long enforcement takes differ by more than an order of magnitude. None of the differences below is a mistake. They become mistakes at the moment the numbers are quoted side by side as if they answered the same question.
- Different populations
- One chain or several. One asset or several. A single issuer or an aggregate. A median over one population says nothing about another, and population is the field most often left unstated.
- Different units of count
- Some studies count enforcement actions, some count affected addresses, some count transactions. One action against many addresses moves each of the three counts differently, and the resulting rates are not comparable.
- Different endpoints
- An interval can be measured to the block timestamp of execution, to the moment a public feed showed it, or to the moment the study’s own collector saw it. The last two measure the observer as much as the event.
- Different treatment of unmeasurable cases
- Events with no measurable starting endpoint are dropped by some studies and counted as zero by others. Dropping and zeroing move a median in opposite directions, which is enough on its own to explain most of the published spread.
- Different periods, compared as one
- Studies covering different years are quoted together as a single state of the world. Where the underlying quantity is itself changing over time, that comparison manufactures a disagreement that does not exist.