For the first time ethereum has surpassed bitcoin in trading volumes on US’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase.
According to the stock traded platform, ethereum handled 26% of all trading volumes in Q2, up from 21%. Bitcoin handled 24%, significantly down from 39% in Q1.
That suggests this might have been a fluke with eth rising significantly in the second quarter after bitcoin had kind of locally peaked at $64,000, hence the significant change in its volumes.
In more interesting data, institutional trading volumes are beginning to dominate, up to $317 billion from $215 billion and a magnitude higher than the $17 billion in Q2 2020.
For retail investors volumes reached $145 billion from $120 billion and are significantly higher than the $11 billion in Q2 2020.
Institutional investors are also beginning to overtake in ownership with $92 billion of the assets on the platform held by them, up from $11 billion in Q2 2020.
For retail, they held $15 billion in assets in Q2 2020, and now hold $88 billion as of the latest quarter with institutional investors taking over in Q4 2020.
Still there isn’t a huge gap between institutional and retail ownership, while for trading volumes theres a $172 billion difference.
So institutional investors clearly trade a lot more, with it unclear what exactly this suggests except that both retail and institutional investors have a somewhat equal amount of influence where basic supply and demand is concerned.
Hence we continue to see volatility of 50% drops and gains as retail panics or fomos in, with that perhaps influencing more bitcoin’s medium to long term price.
Financial housing firms on the other hand probably have more influence in the short term as they trade twice more than retail investors.
Coinbase also said they now have 68 million total verified users, which is about 47 million more than can have a whole bitcoin.
Retail Monthly Transacting Users (MTUs) grew to 8.8 million, up 44% from Q1 2021, with over 9,000 institutions who continue to deepen and broaden their activities in the cryptoeconomy and more than 160,000 ecosystem partners who are using our crypto tools and services to engage with their own customers.
