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ÂCryptoCompare’s Exchange Review aims to capture the key developments within the cryptocurrency exchange market. Our review focuses on analyses that relate to exchange volumes, which include those related to crypto derivatives trading, market segmentation by exchange fee models, and crypto to crypto vs fiat to crypto volumes.
July 2019
Macro Analysis and Market Segmentation
- Exchange Benchmarking Analysis – Based on CryptoCompare’s Exchange Benchmark grading, AA-graded exchange volume is up 29% while lower quality volume still dominates. Exchanges with grades AA represented 5% (31 billion USD) of total aggregate volume in July, while those rated A and B represented 19% (119 billion USD) and 8% (47 billion USD) respectively. Trading volume is still dominated by lower quality exchanges, with D-E rated exchanges representing 64% combined (316 billion USD).On aggregate, volume from trusted exchanges (AA-B) increased 4.4% while volume from untrusted exchanges (C-F) only increased 0.7%. Aggregate trusted exchange volume still only represents 32% of the total market.
- Trade Data Analysis – Untrusted exchanges LBank, Coinsbit and CoinBene had the largest average trade sizes relative to other top exchanges at an average of 3.7, 1.6 and 1.1 BTC respectively. LBank’s (D-rated) average trade size within its BTC/USDT market was roughly 15 times higher than that of Coinbase’s (AA-rated) BTC/USD market. In terms of trade count, LBank traded an average of 25,000 trades per day, while Coinbase traded over 100,000 trades per day on BTC/USDT and BTC/USD markets respectively.
- Predominant Fee Type – Exchanges that charge taker fees represented 75% of total exchange volume in July, while those that implement trans-fee mining (TFM) represented 23%. Fee-charging exchanges traded a total of 445 billion USD in July (up 0.4% since June), while those that implement TFM traded 137 billion USD (down 5% since June).
- Derivatives Trading (Institutional Products) – Regulated bitcoin derivatives product volumes are still dominated by CME, whose total trading volumes are up 4.23% since June at 8.2 billion USD. Meanwhile, Grayscale’s bitcoin trust product (GBTC), continued to increase in terms of total trading volume with 1.98 billion USD traded in July (up 6.02% since June).
- Derivatives Trading (BitMEX and BitFlyer) – BitMEX’s total perpetual bitcoin futures product volume leads at $68 billion, while that of bitFlyer’s stood at $31 billion in July. BitMEX’s volume is up 5.51% since June while bitFlyer Lighting’s volume is down 6.92%. Despite BitMEX’s large Bitcoin outflows documented by TokenAnalyst on the 19th of July, and the recent reports concerning an investigation of the exchange by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission, trading activity increased since June.
- Fiat Capabilities – Trading volume from exchanges that offer only crypto pairs represented 84% (497 billion USD) of total trading volume in July, while fiat to crypto exchanges represented 16% (93 billion USD). This is similar in proportion to the previous two months.
- Bitcoin to Fiat Volumes – In July, 48% of all Bitcoin trading into fiat was made up of the US Dollar. BTC to USD volumes increased, from 2.04 million BTC in June to 2.11 million in July (up 4%). Meanwhile, BTC trading into JPY represented 1.37 million BTC in July (up 25% since June), while BTC trading into EUR represented 442,000 BTC (up 1.78% since June).
- Bitcoin to Stablecoin Volumes – In July, BTC trading into USDT represented 67.6% of total volume (traded into fiat or stablecoin). BTC trading into USDT totalled 9.25 million BTC (up 18% since June).
Exchange Volumes
- Top Crypto to Crypto Exchange Volumes – LBank was the top crypto to crypto exchange by total volume in July at 45 billion USD (up 42% since June). This was followed by OKEx and CoinBene at 43.9 billion USD (up 30%) and 39.3 billion USD (up 3.29%) respectively.
- Top Fiat to Crypto Exchange Volumes – Bithumb was the top fiat exchange by total volume in July at 20.4 billion USD (up 46.4% since June). This was followed by Coinbase and Bitfinex at 12.5 billion USD (down 2%) and 9.35 billion USD (down 15.2%) respectively.
- Trans-Fee Mining Exchanges – CoinBene was the top TFM exchange by total volume in July at 39.3 billion USD (up 3.29%), followed by Bitforex at 35.1 billion USD (down 7.5%) and EXX at 19.9 billion USD (up 26.1%).
- Decentralised Exchanges – IDEX was the largest DEX in July trading a total of 44.6 million USD (down 17%), followed by Switcheo and BitSquare trading 16.5 million USD (down 43%) and 16.4 million USD (down 35%) respectively. DEXs represent only a small fraction of global spot exchange volume (0.01%), trading a monthly total of 86.9 million USD in July.
This article by CryptoCompare Research first appeared on the CryptoCompare blog. You can check out the original post here and the full 28-page July 2019 report here.
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