There’s been a shakeup in the crypto futures marketplace in the month and a half since Bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset industry crashed on March 12th.
After “Black Thursday,” BitMEX has lost a portion of its futures marketplace to Binance, reports the crypto intelligence firm Coin Metrics.
BitMEX says it suffered two distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the midst of Bitcoin’s March crash, which caused 156 accounts to sustain losses as a result of late processing of market orders. The cryptocurrency exchange and derivatives platform has since lost market share both in volume and open interest.
That’s been a boon for Binance, which now powers around 25% of all futures volume in the crypto marketplace. Says Coin Metrics,
“This may have an on-going impact across crypto markets, especially considering BitMEX’s outsized influence on price discovery. Only time will tell if BitMEX is able to recover the lost market share, or if the marketplace is undergoing a true changing of the guard.”
Meanwhile, the number of active Bitcoin addresses is on the rise. The growing network activity may indicate new traders are entering the market despite the crash. Coin Metrics reports a 12.1% week-over-week growth in daily active addresses.
Stablecoins are thriving in the month and a half since Black Thursday, gaining $1 billion in market cap since the start of the month. That was mostly due to Tether issued on Ethereum (USDT_ETH), which grew from $4.43 billion to $5.14 billion in the first 19 days of April.
Most stablecoins are launched as ERC-20 tokens, but their impact on Ethereum remains a point of contention. Stablecoin growth could increase demand for Ethereum because they require ETH for transaction fees.
Still, over the long term, stablecoins have the potential to take on ETH’s role in the crypto space, according to Coin Metrics, by providing some of the same functionality.
“ETH has a credible claim as money within the crypto space, but stablecoins challenge this view. Stablecoins have the potential, due to their lowered volatility, to become the store-of-value, medium of exchange, and unit of account for crypto transactions and smart contracts that need to store value.”