In the midst of a panic over lawsuits against 2 of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, a Bitcoin advocate (BTC) argued that the BTC market is much larger than what exchanges show.
The total Bitcoin market is not limited to Binance, Coinbase or any other cryptocurrency exchange, Jan3 CEO Samson Mow told Cointelegraph at the BTC Prague 2023 conference on June 9.
“In contrast, I think that in the case of Bitcoin it is much more difficult to quantify what proportion of the market it represents. This is because many of the operations with Bitcoin are carried out in block”, explains Mow.
Mentioning Bitcoin block trading, Mow referred to private trading channels that allow investors to trade semi-anonymously and place large orders to buy or sell BTC. Some of these channels are peer-to-peer (P2P) operations or over-the-counter (OTC):
“Bitcoin has like a black box. You don’t really know how big the market is. If Bitcoin works P2P, you’re not going to quantifiably measure how much Bitcoin is traded.”
Private Bitcoin trading channels like P2P or OTC are not included in the total BTC trading volumes on major cryptocurrency tracking websites like CoinGecko. This means that Bitcoin’s daily trading volume is over $9.6 billion. registered at the close of this edition.
“CoinGecko only tracks trades that take place on cryptocurrency exchanges and does not track trades that take place on P2P platforms and brokers,” CoinGecko co-founder and COO Bobby Ong told Cointelegraph.
“P2P platforms include places like Binance P2P, Huobi P2P, Paxful, Remitano, etc.,” the executive noted. CoinGecko has no plans to track such platforms in the near future, Ong added.
Other than P2P, CoinGecko also does not record institutional trading on OTC, Ong said, adding:
“Institutional operations that occur in the exchanges that we monitor are registered. OTC operations are not registered, since they are like P2P operations, but between large entities.”
New statements from the Jan3 CEO could imply that cryptocurrency exchange moguls like Binance or Coinbase might not dominate the Bitcoin market as much as some think.
In January 2023, Norwegian cryptocurrency research firm K33 Research – formerly Arcane Research – said that Binance handled 92% of the Bitcoin spot market by 2022. “No matter how you look at it in terms of trading activity, Binance is the cryptocurrency market,” the company wrote at the time.
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