Learn·Markets
Volume and TAO flow answer different questions
Volume is the τ of every buy and sell leg in 24 hours, from Taosis's own index of fills — the legs the chain writes for stake moves and transfers included; TAO flow is what users staked minus what they unstaked, from the chain's own counter.
Published 2026-09-17 · updated 2026-09-28
Volume counts both directions
Volume 24h is the τ of every buy and sell leg on the subnet over the last 24 hours — buys plus sells: Σ τ of every buy and sell fill Taosis indexed in the window, from its own index of the chain's StakeAdded and StakeRemoved events.
The chain writes a StakeRemoved and a StakeAdded beside every stake move, transfer and swap, and Volume counts those legs, on both sides; the movement events themselves are not counted a second time. Across subnets the legs are real pool trades, with a fee. On the same subnet they are not: the α leaves and comes back with no swap and no fee, so the pool never sees it — about a tenth of network volume on 28 Sep 2026. Volume is also gross: a wallet that buys and sells the same τ ten times adds twenty fills and changes the pool by nothing.
TAO flow counts what users put in or took out
TAO flow 24h (net staking) is the τ users staked into the subnet minus the τ they unstaked over about 24 hours: stake and unstake, stake moves and swaps between subnets, and limit orders. It comes from SubnetTaoFlow, the chain's own cumulative per-subnet counter, which Taosis samples every few minutes; the figure is the latest sample minus the sample nearest 24 hours earlier. The raw counter means nothing on its own; only the difference between two samples does.
It leaves out the protocol's own τ: the emission injected into the pool each block, the chain's buys of α, and root-basket trades. Those are on the subnet page as emission captured and net protocol flow. The flow is signed — positive means users brought τ in — and never rescaled: the counter moves in lumps, so the real window length in blocks is shown with it. It is blank when no sample lies within 20 minutes of 24 hours ago, when the subnet was registered again inside the window, when the chain's flow EMA (which resets the counter) was written inside the window, or across a runtime upgrade Taosis has not audited. A 7-day figure uses the same method.
Two sources, two ways to be incomplete
Volume depends on Taosis having read every block. The public lite node prunes old state, so after downtime the indexer resumes a bounded distance behind the head and logs the gap rather than crawling blocks that node no longer answers for. A missed block is re-read from an archive node only by hand, once the gap is spotted, so until then the figure can read low but never high — which is why the subnet page labels it "Vol 24h (indexed)".
TAO flow depends on nothing Taosis indexed: the chain keeps the counter, so a missed block loses nothing. Read together, large volume with a TAO flow near zero is turnover, and the sign says which way users moved. Neither says why; the price attribution on the subnet page separates trading from emission.
Where to read them
Both sit in the screener's Size & flow group, on by default and in the Trader preset. The subnet page shows the indexed volume among its headline stats and a table of the recent fills — time, side, τ, α, wallet — or a note that the watcher has not indexed fills for it yet.
None of it comes from a third-party market feed. The fills and the counter are both read from the chain, which is why the sources, and their gaps, are stated rather than smoothed over.
Read next
Reading price attribution
Trading versus emission, decomposed exactly rather than fitted — with the leftover always published.
How the α price works
It is a ratio between two chain values, not an order book — which is why the price can move with no trade at all.
How Taosis reads the chain
Storage items read on a cadence, events indexed as they happen, and series that begin the day the watching began — which is why every figure names its source.