AbstractRyu2026-08-01

Is a low SSR really dry powder? — Only 40.7% sits on exchanges (1/4)

A low SSR is read as thick sidelined buying power. Whether that capital is genuinely sidelined, however, is not something the metric itself reveals. Position, not purpose. A large share of the denominator has already been deployed elsewhere, and that share can be measured — not by purpose, but by position. Of $146.4B in stablecoin supply, exchange wallets hold $59.55B, or 40.7%. The remaining 59.3% sits off exchanges: in DeFi, in payment and transfer flows, in custody. Because SSR uses the entire denominator, it counts roughly 2.5x the immediately deployable capital as dry powder. The share is not fixed. Since 2018 the exchange supply ratio has moved between 0.2 and 0.7 — a range wide enough that the same SSR reading points to two different markets depending on where in that range it was taken. A reading recorded when 70% of supply sat on exchanges and one recorded at 30% are not comparable quantities, even though the metric prints the same number. This is why lining today's SSR up against its historical levels does not hold as a like-for-like comparison. None of this makes the metric wrong. It makes it incomplete on its own. Keep the exchange supply ratio on the same screen as SSR, and read the position of the denominator before its size. Next: what SSR looks like when the denominator is narrowed to exchange balances only.