There are 159,190,282 satUSD in existence this morning. Across every market CoinGecko tracks for the token, $23 of it changed hands in the last 24 hours. The deepest of those markets, a PancakeSwap pool on BNB Chain holding $3.67 million of liquidity, recorded two trades, both sells, worth $10.07 together.

satUSD is the dollar token of River, a Bitcoin-collateralized lending protocol formerly called Satoshi Protocol. That supply figure has read the same since December 27, 2025.

How the token is supposed to work

River runs what it calls an omni-CDP. You deposit BTC-based collateral on one chain and borrow satUSD against it, up to 90.91% of the collateral's value, and the borrowed token can show up on a different chain because satUSD is issued under LayerZero's omnichain token standard. That is how one asset ends up on 11 networks at once. The project raised $12 million in a strategic round backed by TRON's Justin Sun, Arthur Hayes's Maelstrom Fund and The Spartan Group.

A borrower exits by repaying. You hand back the satUSD you minted, the debt closes, and the collateral is released. Selling into a pool is the exit for everyone else who ended up holding the token — the yield farmer, the person who took it as payment.

252 days without a mint or a burn

satUSD supply peaked at $423.9 million on October 28, 2025. It came down in steps over the next eight weeks: $288 million on November 5, $218 million on November 15, $208.6 million through early December, $164.5 million just before Christmas. On December 27 it reached $159.1 million and stopped.

Since that date there have been 251 daily readings, and every one of them sits between $158.94 million and $159.61 million. A spread of 0.42% over eight months. The drift is small enough to come from rounding in how DefiLlama snapshots balances rather than from anyone minting or repaying.

satUSD outstanding, September 2025 to September 2026

Sum of tracked balances across all chains, in millions of dollars, sampled at the first of each month. The peak of $423.9 million fell on October 28, 2025, between the October and November readings.

I checked the chain data against the contracts directly, because a flat line usually means a broken tracker. Calling totalSupply() on the BNB Chain contract returns 81,364,091.20 tokens. Base returns 32,670,776.28. Arbitrum returns 10,781,765.05. Those match DefiLlama's per-chain figures to the cent. The data feed is fine. The token is what stopped moving.

One footnote for anyone who saw satUSD on a screener this week showing 14.7% weekly growth. That reading came from a snapshot on August 31 that dropped the $20.4 million sitting on the BOB network out of the total, which made the week-ago baseline too low. No tokens were issued that week.

Twenty-three dollars

The market side is thinner than the supply side suggests. Three venues quote satUSD: the PancakeSwap V3 pool on BNB Chain, a Uniswap V3 pool on X Layer that did $11 of volume, and a Uniswap V4 pool on Base that did $2.21. Base is where it gets awkward. There are $32.67 million of satUSD tokens on Base. The largest pool trading them holds $18,487, and the second largest holds $2,834.

What a 99.5-cent quote is worth here

Price aggregators show satUSD at $0.9951, which reads like a stablecoin holding its peg. That number comes out of pools where two people traded ten dollars yesterday. A quote from an order book nobody touches tells you what the last small trade cleared at, and nothing about what $1 million of selling would do. For BNB Chain, the pool depth is real at $3.67 million. For the $32.67 million on Base, roughly $21,000 of pooled liquidity stands behind it.

The domain stopped answering

River's website is river.inc. Queried through Cloudflare's and Google's public DNS resolvers on September 5, the apex returns no address record at all. Every subdomain the project used — www, app, docs, blog — returns NXDOMAIN, the response that means the name does not exist. The zone still lists its Cloudflare nameservers and a start-of-authority record, and past those two entries it is bare, including the mail records the project would need to receive email at its own domain.

The older domains do worse. satoshiprotocol.org answers with a 302 redirect to www.river.inc, a hostname that no longer resolves. satoshiprotocol.io loads a Vietnamese online gambling site.

Search engines still hold a blog post from that vanished subdomain announcing Season 6 of River's points program, running July 1 to September 30, 2026, with a claim of 82,000 users. The season has three weeks left to run and the page it was published on cannot be reached.

An empty DNS zone can come from an expired card on a Cloudflare account or a migration someone botched on a Friday. It is not proof of abandonment, and the smart contracts are demonstrably still live — they answered my calls. What it does mean is that the interface a borrower would use to repay a loan and get their Bitcoin back is currently unreachable through a browser.

The rest of the picture

River's tracked collateral stands at $99.6 million today against a peak of $628.0 million on October 2, 2025. Bitcoin fell 32.8% over the same stretch, from $118,931 to $79,942, and the collateral is BTC-denominated. Hold the coin count fixed and price alone would leave the pile near $422 million, so roughly $322 million of collateral was withdrawn rather than repriced. DefiLlama also carried an alert on River's page running to December 30, 2025, warning that the protocol included unproductive positions that could inflate its metrics. Supply froze three days before that alert expired.

The RIVER governance token had a strange January. It ran to an all-time high of $87.73 on January 26, 2026, up roughly 500% for the year, and analysts quoted by Yahoo Finance pointed at 94% of supply sitting in five wallets and futures volume running more than 80 times spot. The token trades at $1.36 now, 98.4% off that high, on $6.9 million of daily volume. The governance token turns over 300,000 times more value per day than the stablecoin it governs.

How to run this check on any dollar token you hold

  • Look at supply history before price history. A peg chart of a dormant token is a flat line, and so is a peg chart of a healthy one. Mint-and-burn activity separates them. Every major stablecoin dashboard shows outstanding supply by day.
  • Compare pool depth to supply, per chain. Aggregate liquidity hides the problem. $32.67 million of satUSD on Base against $21,000 of pooled depth is a per-chain fact that the global number smooths over.
  • Count trades, not volume. GeckoTerminal reports buys and sells per pool for the last hour and the last 24 hours. Two trades in a day on the deepest pool is a clearer signal than any dollar figure.
  • Type the project's domain into a DNS lookup. It takes ten seconds and it is the cheapest diligence available. A front end that has gone missing does not freeze your tokens, and it does tell you how much attention the project is getting from the people who run it.

The 98% drawdown in the RIVER token is the least interesting fact in this article. Tokens fall. What matters more is that $159 million of dollar-denominated claims against Bitcoin collateral have been sitting completely still for eight months on eleven blockchains, quoted at 99.5 cents by pools that see a couple of trades a day, with the project's own website returning nothing. Every part of that is public and none of it took more than an afternoon to pull. If you are holding a stablecoin whose issuer you would struggle to name in one sentence, the supply chart on DefiLlama and a free DNS lookup will tell you more than the price ever will.