Bitcoin trading volumes declining across numerous exchanges

According to a recent review of top crypto exchanges’ performance in 2019, a crypto analytics site CryptoCompare has deduced that the trading volume has been on a significant decline in recent months. Meanwhile, when it comes to the derivatives market, Binance is experiencing a sharp rise which is taking it up through the ranks.

Trading regular cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, has been dropping in late 2019, resulting in around $432 billion traded in December. The largest exchanges have experienced the most severe drop — up to 26%, according to the report.

Are you looking for signals & alerts from pro-traders? Sign-up to Invezz Signals™ for FREE. Takes 2 mins.

The bearish trend has been gaining strength ever since the second half of June when crypto prices saw another severe drop after reaching their peak in 2019. As many likely remember, this was just after Bitcoin approached the $14k mark, after which it started going down again.

At the same time, CryptoCompare also noted that the market appears to be leaning towards lower-quality exchanges. Analysts reached this conclusion after calculating that top-tier exchange volume only represented around 27% of the total trading volume. This, in turn, signals the rise of wash trading.

How did exchanges perform?

CryptoCompare also noted a few other details regarding the use of crypto exchanges. For example, those that charge maker and/or taker fees took a relatively moderate hit last month, as they traded around $319 billion. This represents an 18% drop from November 2019.

Meanwhile, mining exchanges that do not have such fees, saw an even larger drop of around 30%, resulting in only $108.87 billion in trades. Even so, there were some exchanges that benefitted, such as Bitforex, which emerged as the largest crypto-to-crypto exchange in December 2019. The exchange saw a total of $35.64 billion last month, which is around 5% more than in November.

Among the fiat-to-crypto exchanges, the best performer was P2PB2B, which traded $27.54 billion in December, although this was still 11% lower than the levels it saw a month before. Among DEXes, IDEX took the lead with traded $8.02 million, which is 13% higher than in November. Even so, it is a minor sum when compared to centralized firms.

A drop was also noticed in the derivatives market, where the CME traded only $3.96 billion in December, as opposed to November’s $4.22 billion. GBTC also saw a major drop of 20%, resulting in $394.72 in December trades. But, as mentioned, Binance managed to attract a lot of attention by seeing the platform become the third-largest derivatives trader, right after BitMEX and Huobi.