The latest CryptoCompare Exchange Review has been released, and one of the interesting takeaways is the emerging consolidation of exchanges’ web traffic to fewer exchanges. Namely, exchanges that are highly rated by CryptoCompare are garnering more of the web traffic “market share.”
(source: CryptoCompare)
Overall web traffic to cryptoasset exchanges’ websites has been on the decline since June, along with overall trading volume itself which declined from July to August.
However, a couple of the most popular exchanges saw dramatic increases in their web traffic during this period of overall web traffic decline. Binance saw a 68% increase in web traffic from July to August, and Coinbase’s more than doubled – with123% more traffic in August. US-based Bittrex also saw a slight increase for the number 3 spot.
(source: CryptoCompare)
It is notable that Binance and Coinbase are what might be deemed high-quality exchanges, in that they ranked quite well across a variety of metrics on the recent CryptoCompare Exchange Benchmark – at #8 and #1 respectively.
Binance and Coinbase up, trading down
Another interesting thing to note about the particular surge in web traffic for these two exchanges is that it has come even as trading volume fell during the month of August. Binance’s trading volume has in fact been cut in half from June to August; down to about $30 billion in August from $50 billion in July.
(source: CryptoCompare)
At least in the case of Binance, we might speculate that the increased web traffic is at least in part driven by the blocking, and subsequent transfer of U.S. users to a U.S.-only version of the exchange.
This Binance.US exchange, opening its virtual doors today (September 19), is Binance’s response to concerns surrounding the trading of unregulated security tokens which is illegal for its U.S. users. Indeed, the search term “Binance US” saw a spike on Google Trends (in the U.S.) for the month of August.
(source: Google Trends)
At any rate, this distillation of web traffic into higher-rated exchanges is an interesting trend to keep an eye on. Because while these higher-ranked exchanges don’t host much more trade volume than the lower-ranked ones, it is also well known that volume figures can be easily manipulated.
