On Thursday (April 8), CryptoCompare, a leading cryptoasset market data provider, released the March 2021 edition of CryptoCompare Research’s “Exchange Review” report.
The March 2021 report, which was sponsored by AAX, the world’s first crypto exchange powered by London Stock Exchange Group’s LSEG Technology, provides many interesting insights, a few of which are highlighted in this article.
Before we start, it is important to point out that CryptoCompare Research makes a distinction between “Top Tier” and “Lower Tier” exchanges.
CryptoCompare’s Exchange Benchmark Methodology currently uses a combination of 68 qualitative and quantitative metrics to assign a grade to over 160 active spot exchanges. Each metric is converted into a series of points based on clearly defined criteria. Metrics are categorised into several buckets, and distributed fairly to arrive at a final robust score, ensuring that no one metric overly influences the overall exchange ranking.
A grading system was implemented to assign each exchange a grade (AA, A, BB, B, C, D, E, F) based on its total cumulative score out of 100. Top-Tier exchanges refer to those that have scored at least 45 points (B and above).
Now, going back to the March 2021 issue of the Exchange Review report, below, we take a look at a few of the many interesting findings of the CryptoCompare research team.
Trading Activity Across Spot Markets
In March, volume from the 15 largest Top-Tier exchanges decreased 9.9% on average (vs February).
Binance (Grade A) was the largest Top-Tier exchange by volume in March, trading $757 bn (down 0.5%). This was followed by Huobi Global (Grade A) trading $210bn (down 1.8%), and OKEx (Grade BB) trading $173bn (down 7.9%). Exchanges Coinbase (AA), BeQuant (BB), and Kraken (AA) followed with $87bn (down 26.5%), $73bn (down 2.9%) and $44bn (down 27.2%).
Trading Activity Across Derivatives Exchanges
Binance was the largest derivatives exchange in March by monthly trading volume with $1.1tn (up 3.5% since February) followed by OKEx ($330bn, down 17.2%), Bybit ($372bn, up 7.7%) and Huobi ($330bn, down 17.2%).
In terms of total USD trading volume, CME’s newly launched ETH futures reached $1.5bn in March (up 51.3% since February). Meanwhile, CME’s BTC futures volumes decreased by 0.5% to $59.4bn. On aggregate (ETH + BTC futures), volumes reached $60.9bn (up 0.3%)
Featured Image by “WorldSpectrum” via Pixabay.com
