June 2019 marked the crescendo month for this season of cryptoasset trading, which saw a final and dramatic explosion of Bitcoin’s price to levels not far from the all-time-high. Now, going into the latter half of 2019, it seems that a cooling-off period is necessary in the markets.
CryptoCompare’s latest and highly regarded monthly Exchange Review is here to shed some light on this exceptional month.
USDT Drops, but Still the Most Dominant Stablecoin
One of the most notable changes in the trading space between May and June is the steep drop in usage of the Tether stablecoin (USDT).
(source: CryptoCompare)
BTC-USDT trading dropped by 34.8% between May and June in Bitcoin terms, and its share of BTC traded for all fiat or stablecoins fell from 76.2% to 69.4%.
While the recent investigation into Tether and Bitfinex by the New York Attorney General may have been seen to dent volumes, USDT still accounted for a huge 97.1% of total BTC trading across the four leading stablecoins – indicating that for now at least, it remains the preferred stablecoin choice.
(source: CryptoCompare)
Most of this value seems to have shifted into fiat trading. Despite this shift, however, Tether remains by far the most used stablecoin to trade against Bitcoin – as well as the most used asset among the category of fiat currencies plus stablecoins.
(source: CryptoCompare)
Exchange Trends
Binance, the top crypto-to-crypto exchange, saw a further increase in the margin of its dominance, gaining an additional 12.7% worth of USD-denominated volume from May – up to $42 billion. Binance, unlike one of its closest competitors in terms of volume, does not practice so-called “transaction fee mining.”
Interestingly, only 2 of the top 10 crypto-to-crypto exchanges by volume are ‘trusted’ – that is achieveing a grade AA-B according to the CryptoCompare Exchange Benchmark, which ranks exchanges according to several criteria to weed out inflated volumes.
(source: CryptoCompare)
The decentralized IDEX exchange saw a healthy uptick during June, from $40 million worth of volume up to about $54 million – a bump of 33%. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues, as IDEX moves toward a controversial KYC regime and geoblocking policy.
(source: CryptoCompare)
Alternatively, the WavesDEX decentralized exchange saw a complete crash in trading volume during June, down from $50 million worth of volume to about $10 million.
This is just the tip of the exchange iceberg. See the full report for more insights.
