Binance, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume, captured 30% of spot volume market share in March, according to a report by CryptoCompare. The market share rose from 29% in February.
According to the report, the exchange handled $490 billion of spot trades in March, a 15% increase from the month prior. Binance was followed by Coinbase (COIN) at $81.9 billion (down 12%) and OKX with $75.9 billion (down 26%), which both accounted for 5% and 4.7% of the market share.
Florian Giovannacci, head of trading at Covario, the Swiss based digital asset prime broker stated, “Binance has had significant market share for quite some time already. They are very reliable (technically), cover a large array of tokens and offer some of the best liquidity, which attracts volume.”
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What you should know
- In March, the price of bitcoin (BTC) reached a monthly high of $48,086.84, according to data from CoinMarketCap. At press time, bitcoin was trading at around $39,450, down approximately 18% since the March high.
- The 30% dominance in March is just marginally below Binance’s record market share of 33.7% which was reached in November 2021.
- Also in March, derivatives volumes increased after six straight months of decreased volumes. Derivative market activity increased by 4.58% to $2.74 trillion, accounting for 62.8% of total centralized exchange volumes while spot volumes accounted for the rest (37.2%).
- This is still significantly lower than the all-time highs reached in May 2021. Derivative volumes reached a total of $9.99 trillion in May last year. The derivatives market share dominated 68% at the time.
- According to the report, “Market participants remain cautious and continue to get crypto exposure through derivative to hedge and speculate against spot markets.”
- Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s (CME) monthly futures volumes across BTC and ETH contracts totaled $48.7bn in March, a 0.18% increase from the month prior.
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- BTC volumes account for 79.8% of these, compared to 20.2% for ETH. Futures volumes in CME have remained stable so far in 2022, but remain notably below the all-time highs reached in October 2021, when volumes totaled $94.7bn.
- The report also acknowledges that BTC option contracts traded in CME increased 33.3% in March to 2,223, the highest number of contracts traded at the exchange since December 2020.
- The increase in BTC option contracts suggests that there is increased speculation amongst some institutional market participants, particularly on Bitcoin’s future price movements.
- BTC spot trading into USDT increased by 16.2% in March, to 3.23mn BTC. BTC spot trading in USD stayed mostly stable, increasing marginally by 0.03% to 949k.
- USDC was the largest stablecoin market after USDT, having traded 110k BTC (up 0.87%) in March.
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Binance also led the derivative markets with 51.6% accounting for $1.41 trillion of total volumes in March. This was followed by OKX, which accounted for 16.3% market share representing $446 billion and Bybit, which accounted for 13.9% market share, representing $380 billion. Derivatives exchanges traded a daily maximum of $137 billion on the 31st of March, down 29.8% from February’s intra-month high of $195 billion.
The report concluded by stating, “In March cryptocurrency exchanges saw an increase of 6.72% in volumes across both derivative and spot markets. This comes as global financial markets endure increased macroeconomic uncertainty following war in eastern Europe and accelerating inflation figures across the globe. Having said this, cryptocurrency prices began to trend upward at the end of March.”
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