Coin Metrics: Crypto-exchange activity shifts from China to the United States.

Mining ban and blocking of crypto-platform operations in China have led to a shrinking share of local bitcoin exchanges in favour of US-based competitors. Analysts at Coin Metrics have reached this conclusion.

What can we learn about crypto activity around the world from looking at trading data?

🌎🌍🌏

Let’s look at two recent trends:
🔹Decreasing activity on China-focused exchanges
🔹 Increasing volume in Turkish lira-quoted Markets

👇

— CoinMetrics.io (we’re hiring!) (@coinmetrics) January 19, 2022

At the region’s largest exchange, Huobi, at the start of the year it accounted for 15% of Bitcoin spot trading volume. By year-end the figure had fallen to one third. The erosion of its position enabled FTX to widen its share from 1% to 10%, Coinbase from 9% to 14%.

A similar situation unfolded in Ethereum spot trading. To a lesser extent, this affected the OKX exchange (formerly OKEx).

The decline in Chinese exchanges’ metrics is also borne out by an analysis of the relative shares of BTC and ETH balances on Huobi.

The shift of activity toward the North American region is evident in higher trading volumes during US market hours (9:30 to 16:00 Eastern Time).

In terms of crypto-fiat pairs, Coin Metrics detected a surge of interest from Turkish investors. Analysts attributed this to a spike in inflation in the country. In December, year-over-year inflation reached 36%.

Against the backdrop of the Turkish lira’s devaluation, Binance’s volume of lira-denominated crypto assets in 2021 reached $160 billion. Turkish citizens’ strongest demand was for stablecoins BUSD ($7 billion) and USDT ($36 billion).

The share of the local currency in Tether’s trading turnover surpassed that of the euro and the British pound.

As reported in January, ForkLog noted that in the fourth quarter of 2021, amid the Turkish lira’s depreciation, daily fiat trading volumes on three major Turkish platforms jumped to an average of $1.8 billion per day.

In September, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that authorities and the Turkish central bank are waging war and fighting against cryptocurrencies.

Subscribe to ForkLog news on Telegram: ForkLog Feed — all the latest news, ForkLog — the most important news, infographics and opinions