In the first part of our cryptocurrency report, we saw that total cryptocurrency market capitalization grew by 44.5%. Ethereum led the growth and its market dominance increased by 1.6%.
We hope that you’re sitting comfortably with your cup of tea as we’re now going to look at the trading volume on the different exchanges and find out which exchange tokens generated the highest return.
Binance Brought Down Trading Volume
Even though market capitalization grew significantly, users were trading less with total spot trading volume going down by 7% ($324m).
Binance accounted for 53% ($183m) of the total gross decline in trading volume followed by Bitfinex ($66m).
Bitstamp and Kraken managed to grow their trading volume in Q2 by 14.8% and 1.3% respectively.
A Shift Towards Decentralized Exchange
Despite the overall decline in spot trading volume on centralized exchanges, we saw an increase in trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEX).
In Q2, there was a net increase of 56.1% in trading volume on DEX. Uniswap V1 contributed the highest gain as it saw a whopping jump of 152.4% ($7M).
While most DEXs increased in trading volume, Kyber was the only one that saw a decline of 14.8% in trading volume.
Why the increase in trading on DEX?
We posit that the growing DeFi movement has made trading on DEX more appealing. We are seeing investors getting into yield farming using DeFi tokens including governance and stablecoins to increase assets.
Average Web Traffic Increased for Top 20 Exchanges
In Q2, web traffic for the top 20 crypto exchanges increased by an average of 11.4%. Binance had the highest share of web traffic amongst all exchanges and its traffic gained 9% quarter-on-quarter.
OKEx saw the highest web traffic gain of 239%. However, this growth may appear inorganic as its top 5 referring sites were crypto ad / faucet sites. Binance also exhibited similar behavior with its top 2 referrers being crypto ad / faucet sites.
Exchange Based Tokens Continue Doing Well
Overall, top 5 exchange tokens (BNB, OKB, LEO, HT, FTT) performed well in Q2 with a total market cap increase of 24%. HT performed well in Q2 with an increase of 25%, trumping BNB at 22%, and LEO at 21%.
Read the full report to see how all the Top 5 Exchange Tokens performed.
Q2 Grand Finale Coming Soon!
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Erina Azmi
Erina is CoinGecko’s market research analyst. Current expertise is finance and crypto - DeFi. Previously in research consulting and often did market analysis.
