South Africa enters the index, and eight numbers move

25

Live venues

from 23

$1.03bn

September, restated

published at $998.38M

+12,161

Spenda depositor addresses

from counting TON

$23.20bn

Set aside at VALR

against $549.67M published

Three venues went public in the last week, two of them South African.

• Luno and VALR, published 5 October — the first venues outside Nigeria in the index.
• Divest, published 9 October, alongside the investigation into whose rails it actually runs on.

The index goes from 23 live venues to 25.

Two countries, and almost the same number

Adding two of South Africa's largest exchanges moved the weekly figure by $5.15M, on a market of $209M.

That is not a mistake, it is the method. Both venues issue a deposit address per client, so a box's size is the only signal of who is behind it. Boxes under $1M lifetime count as customer deposits; above that they are large enough to be a desk or market maker, and they are set aside and disclosed rather than published.

The set-aside is larger than the entire market we publish. We think the conservative number is the honest one, and that hiding the other would not be — so both are on the site.

September keeps its direction

September, which we sent you at $998.38M on 5 October, now reads $1,026,907,045 — up 6.1% on August, against the +6.0% we published.

Three venues and seven method changes moved it 2.9% and did not change the sign. That is the restatement working as it should.

Everything else restated this week

Eight entries went into the methodology log between 5 and 11 October. All of them move published numbers, so all of them belong here.

TON is now published, for Quidax and Spenda. The chain was measured for both but held out of published totals until this week:

Quidax's TON rail is 1,390 customer accounts and $5.09M of USDT going back to September 2024. Spenda's is 12,161 depositor addresses and $2.65M from May 2025. Spenda gains 12,161 addresses — 7.7% more depositors than we had been crediting it with.

Shared-rail venues now report full flow. From 10 October the four venues where business and personal money arrive on the same address stopped reporting a size-banded slice:

We stopped naming unconfirmed clients. A venue is named as another venue's client only where the relationship is confirmed; Quidax and Obiex are the only rails publishing named clients for now. Obiex's lifetime business goes $9.653bn → $9.650bn.

Two corrections, in opposite directions:

• Chipper — one address counted as a customer deposit address is internal infrastructure. It moved $8.40M. Lifetime retail goes $92.74M → $84.34M. A September review applied a stricter threshold and left it in; this one caught it.
• Quidax — 387 addresses treated as internal plumbing are customer deposit addresses: outside senders paid into them before Quidax ever did. At the same time a venue's own transfers into its own addresses stopped counting as deposits. Lifetime retail $322.35M → $327.76M, total flow $911.93M → $916.85M.

That last one moved a number up. We publish those the same way.

Every entry, with its date and the figures it moved, is in the methodology log.