With Amberdata’s on-chain data, you can query and visualize the minting and burning of a token such as a stablecoin. As the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse has demonstrated, external factors can have big effects on crypto. On March 10 2023, the USDC stablecoin depegged because Circle, the company that built and maintains the USDC reserves, had around $3B at SVB. This led to a panic about the viability of Circle and prompted the abrupt movement of funds to other stablecoins.

Let’s take a look at the minting and burning of the USDC token surrounding the SVB collapse. Stablecoin mints and burns are everyday events related to the market demand for a particular coin. As the news of SVB and Circle broke, a rush for USDC holders began to redeem (or burn) their USDC tokens for USD. This began the depegging of USDC from its usual $1. In volatile events like this, following and understanding this activity has significant benefits for research, trading, and other use cases. In this one-pager we look at one such analysis, how it’s done, which data to use and how to create the visual representation of the data.

How can you analyze this data? We started by pulling token transfers for the USDC token contract (0xA0b86991c6218b36c1d19D4a2e9Eb0cE3606eB48) using the token transfers endpoint here. Next, we filtered for the mint and burn events and after summing these we use Plotly to visualize the daily amount of mint and burn events and compare them. In the chart below, it’s clear that while on most days mints and burns are roughly equal, from March 10-12 there were more burns than mints. This is due to all the transfers away from USDC after the SVB collapse.

To replicate this, our code is available in this Jupyter Notebook. To learn more about the flow of funds, please read our explanation here.