In 2025, the time zone of UTC+8, the blockchain accounting tool viewed as the "on-chain dollar," recorded an annual global on-chain transaction volume of approximately 25 trillion U.S. dollars after deduplication, yet less than 1% of this was directly related to real demand such as actual payments and cross-border settlements; nearly all of it was trapped in cycles of high-frequency matching, arbitrage rotations, and internal transfers. This astonishing data contrast has torn open a rift in what is called "on-chain prosperity": behind the dazzling numbers, how much of this is real economy and how much is just a self-feeding game? During the same period, Russian courts issued fines totaling around 11 million rubles to Telegram multiple times since 2022, and in February 2026, there was another ruling of approximately 11 million rubles in fines. In a context where global regulation is tightening, information platforms and on-chain capital flows are becoming increasingly intertwined. All of this raises questions: When amplified on-chain transaction data is continuously packaged as "adoption rates" and "real demand," what opportunities and hidden dangers does it represent for industry participants and regulators?

The Truth Behind the 25 Trillion Transaction Volume

● Data Composition: The research covers 16 mainstream public chains and 36 types of accounting currencies. After deduplicating on-chain addresses and transaction paths, an annual transaction volume of about 25 trillion U.S. dollars was still derived. This figure is often directly equated with "on-chain dollar demand" or "cryptocurrency transaction volume" in secondary markets and promotional materials, yet few take the time to seriously dissect the types and behavioral structures of transactions behind it.

● Real Payment Proportion: According to statistics, in this 25 trillion U.S. dollars, less than 1% is used directly for real payment scenarios such as goods and services settlement, cross-border trade, and personal remittances. Most of the capital flows occur between inter-exchange transfers, market-making arbitrage, and programmed high-frequency trading, with funds rapidly circulating between different platforms and addresses, serving liquidity and market depth rather than providing infrastructure for real economic payment needs.

● Non-Substantial Transaction Structure: "Non-substantial transactions mainly include internal fund transfers within the same institution and speculative trading," a comment from China Securities Journal pinpointed the core of the issue. Much of the "on-chain activity" comes from institutions moving volume between their cold and hot wallets, or market makers transporting chips across different platforms, creating trades and depth through wash trades. For the system, these are the technical flows needed to maintain market operations, but they are almost entirely unrelated to real user consumption, wage payments, and trade settlements.

● Narrative Amplification Mechanism: Despite highly distorted on-chain data, media, project teams, and platforms still delight in packaging total transaction amounts as evidence of "real demand": roadmaps state "serving global payment infrastructure," white papers cite "trillions of dollars in settlement volumes," and institutional roadshow PPTs use "on-chain dollar scale surpasses traditional payment networks" as a selling point. Everyone knows there is significant empty circulation involved, yet all transactions are implicitly categorized as "adoption" to sustain a sufficiently grand growth narrative.

How Speculation and Arbitrage Squeeze Out Real Payment Space

● Sources of Inflated Transactions: When breaking down on-chain transactions by type, inflated figures mainly stem from several types of technical and speculative behaviors: frequent transfers between multiple addresses under the same institution for position management or "driving volume"; wash trading by market makers on both sides of the order book, repeatedly placing and withdrawing orders to refresh depth; cross-platform arbitrage and grid strategies oscillating between different price ranges to capture tiny price differences. All these are statistically considered "transaction volume," yet fundamentally only represent self-circulation of funds within the same system.

● Comparison of Essential Demand Volumes: In contrast, real demand scenarios such as cross-border remittances, salary payments, and supply chain settlements are extremely weak in overall volume. Even in areas where foreign exchange controls and traditional remittance costs are high, the proportion of blockchain accounting tools genuinely used for "workers sending money home" is far less than commonly imagined. It mainly remains as an interface role for funds entering and exiting exchanges and over-the-counter exchanges, rarely penetrating to the merchant collection and everyday consumption ends.

● Factors Hindering Penetration: The high volatility of the overall crypto asset environment, uncertainty in regulatory attitudes across countries, and user thresholds like private key management, fee fluctuations, and transaction experiences all suppress this accounting tool’s penetration into everyday payments. For ordinary users, a digital credential that may be impacted daily by policies, hackers, or market sentiments is hard to become a reliable long-term medium for wages and savings, let alone replace bank cards and local currency payment systems.

● Incentives to Narrate Through Transactions: Under the model of "narrative supported by transactions," project teams hope to see vast on-chain data to support valuation and financing stories, exchanges rely on high turnover to amplify fee income and market influence, and market makers and professional institutions obtain rebates, market-making subsidies, and spread profits through inflated transactions. As for retail investors, they are drawn into a seemingly prosperous yet highly insular game: attracted by total volume numbers and the slogan of "institutions are using it," yet often lacking the ability to distinguish between real demand and technical traffic.

From China Securities Journal to Court Judgments: Narratives Start to Be Repriced

● Shift in Official Discourse: The China Securities Journal publicly disclosed and commented on inflated on-chain transactions, indicating that traditional finance and official media have begun to proactively redefine the main uses of such accounting tools: not as "engine for the global payment revolution," but as tools for high-frequency speculation, arbitrage, and internal fund operations. Once this qualitative change forms, it will directly impact how regulators position them—from "payment innovation" closer to the regulatory framework of "high-risk financial products."

● Signals from Continuous Fines in Russia: Since 2022, Russian courts have repeatedly fined Telegram, with total fines around 11 million rubles, focused on compliance issues such as content review and data submission. In February 2026, another penalty of about 11 million rubles was disclosed, indicating that regulatory agencies maintain a stance of long-term pressure, viewing it as a highly sensitive platform at the intersection of information and potential financial activities rather than merely a communication tool.

● Caution Regarding Reports of 35 Million Rubles: There are reports circulating in the market regarding 35 million rubles in fines, but so far these have only appeared in a few channels, lacking clear judgment dates and official document support, with related information in a pending verification state. In the context of missing data and limited sources, recklessly amplifying this figure alone would replicate the "inflated data" logic, hence it is necessary to emphasize that it should not be treated as a given fact but to maintain information caution.

● Interwoven Regulatory Concerns: In the eyes of regulators, the issue is not merely whether a platform cooperates with content reviews, but the interwoven risks of large yet distorted on-chain traffic, cross-border capital movements, and the role of information dissemination platforms. A platform that simultaneously accommodates crypto communities, project financing promotions, over-the-counter matching, and potential funding channels, once tied to highly inflated on-chain transaction volumes, will naturally be viewed as a systemic risk node and become a priority target for stricter regulation and higher penalties.

Telegram Stuck Between On-Chain Capital and Sovereign Regulation

● Key Role in the Crypto Space: Over the past few years, Telegram has become one of the infrastructures of the crypto world: countless project communities have gathered here, early airdrops, whitelists, and beta testing information first spread through groups and channels, and some projects even directly built bot wallets and simple DApps within the chat application. It is both a public opinion arena and a lightweight product distribution and potential funding matching space, naturally advantageous for the incubation of new projects and private domain traffic operations.

● The Game Behind Frequent Fines: Russia's multiple fines against Telegram superficially revolve around data delivery, content review, and other compliance blur areas, while behind this lies a dual game of information control and financial spillover. On one hand, authorities want to reinforce their control over domestic public opinion and data flows; on the other hand, when many discussions and over-the-counter matching related to accounting currencies occur on this platform, it is seen as a potential route to bypass domestic financial and capital control systems, and naturally encounters more stringent restraints.

● Coupling of Social Platforms and On-Chain Inflation: When highly inflated on-chain transactions combine with social messaging platforms, the challenges posed to anti-money laundering and capital outflow monitoring become more complex. Regulatory bodies find it difficult to judge the source and use of funds solely based on on-chain addresses, while anonymous groups, bot transfers, and cross-border connections within chat applications further fragment the investigation path. Even if the majority of transactions are merely arbitrage rotations, in the eyes of regulators, they are difficult to distinguish from actual money laundering and illegal foreign exchange transactions.

● Multiple Possible Future Paths: In an environment where regulatory tightening is occurring in multiple countries, Telegram's choices generally fall between three paths: one is to proactively advance compliance, achieving data and content cooperation with authorities in some markets to reduce overall regulatory pressure; the second is to accept regional segmentation, being restricted or even blocked in tightly regulated markets while continuing to exist as a center for crypto communities in other jurisdictions; the third is to promote users and ecosystem participants seeking technical circumvention, dispersing risks through decentralized social interactions and crypto relays, but this also means that the platform's voice in the crypto ecosystem will gradually diminish.

Institutional Bitcoin Seizing, Coexisting with Bubble Transactions

● MetaPlanet's Bitcoin Bet: On another narrative line, the Japanese listed company MetaPlanet has been reported by several crypto media to hold approximately 35,100 BTC and plans to continue fundraising through multiple means to increase its position. This public Bitcoin balance sheet strategy is being packaged as a "diversification of corporate treasury" and "hedging against local currency depreciation," also creating new valuation stories and arbitrage spaces in the capital market.

● Comparison of Two Asset Logics: In stark contrast to the short-term high-frequency, arbitrage, and internal transfer-dominated inflated transactions of accounting currencies, Bitcoin, from an institutional perspective, is closer to a high-volatility, long-duration allocative asset. The former pursues turnover rates and matching frequency, while the latter is treated as a "reserve" on the balance sheet. Risk-return characteristics are thus differentiated: inflated transactions depend more on liquidity and policy windows, while Bitcoin positions emphasize cycles, macro environments, and hedging narratives.

● Bias in Asset Digitalization Narrative: Institutional entries and listed companies revealing their holdings strengthen the grand narrative of "asset digitalization," yet have not led to a qualitative increase in the proportion of real payments on-chain. Large Bitcoin purchases primarily change the asset allocation structure and market confidence, without altering the fact that real payments account for less than 1% of the 25 trillion U.S. dollars volume of accounting currencies. In other words, the digital leap on the asset side does not automatically lead to real penetration of payment scenarios on the payment side.

● Misalignment of Perception Risks: In an environment where regulation tightens and on-chain data distorts, institutions and retail investors experience a misalignment in risk perception. Institutions often dissect transaction types, assess regulatory paths and asset quality before entering the market, while retail investors are more easily driven by narratives such as "total transaction volume," "institutions are buying," "a certain company holds 35,100 BTC," overlooking the structural inflation and policy uncertainties behind the data. When regulations start reshaping rules based on real usage scenarios, the party that comes to realize this late is often the ordinary investors who lack information and bargaining power.

When the Inflation is Squeezed Out, Who Can Still Sit at the Table?

When we break down the approximately 25 trillion U.S. dollars in on-chain scale in 2025 by transaction type, we discover the reality that real payments account for less than 1%, indicating that the industry has long treated high-frequency speculation and internal fund operations as evidence of "global adoption." This misalignment not only amplifies the perception of risk and resource allocation distortions but also unconsciously shapes an ecosystem that evaluates projects and platforms based on transaction volume rather than actual utility.

From the China Securities Journal publicly identifying inflated on-chain transactions to Russian courts consistently imposing fines at the 11 million ruble level to pressure Telegram, different countries are following distinctly different regulatory paths, yet converge at a crucial point: beginning to reprice the risks of data authenticity and cross-border capital flows. If the future regulation reshapes rules based on real usage scenarios, distinguishing technical traffic from real economic demand, project teams will need to shift from "inflating on-chain numbers" to "enhancing real service capabilities," platforms must transition from chasing extreme turnover rates to a controllable business structure, and institutions will also need to reconstruct asset allocation logic within compliance boundaries.

For investors, a more practical strategy is to learn to distinguish between "on-chain noise" and "real demand": do not passively let transaction volumes used to spin stories attract you, but focus on the intrinsic quality of the assets, flexibility to regulatory changes, cash flows, and governance structures—dimensions that are harder to inflate. When the trend shifts from "looking at who has bigger data" to "looking at who still has real users and businesses after the tide of inflation quickly retreats," those who can continue to sit at the table are often not the best storytellers but those who began subtracting from the data and adding to the risks the earliest.

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