On October 20, 2020, the volume of Bitcoin (BTC) held for substantial exchanges fell under 2.5 million BTC for the first time of 2 seasons.
Nexo co founder Antoni Trenchev opined to Cointelegraph this trend is driven by the world eventually knowing that merely Bitcoin offers sound monetary policy:
“[People are] gradually are experiencing what some of us have known for a while – BTC is the only sound monetary policy at the moment and also you can’t pay for to depart from the best performing asset of the decade.”
He also noted that the community is actually resorting more to self custody solutions, including platforms like Nexo, just where they can “tax-efficiently borrow from the assets of theirs rather than marketing them.” Cointelegraph noted yesterday that the Bitcoin supply is currently diffused greater than ever.
Alex Mashinsky, co founder of the Celsius crypto lending wedge, told Cointelegraph that the exodus will probably continue unless of course interchanges begin to offer much better terms to their customers:
“As long as exchanges refuse to give the clients of theirs more they are going to leave them and go to Celsius. We simply crossed $2.7B in debris since launch 2 years ago. We wouldn’t be cultivating extremely quickly unless we did even more to the customers of ours than exchanges.”
By the chart above, we can see that this swing has not affected each interchanges equally. While balances at Bitfinex and BitMEX ended up being decimated, lessening by much more than half, Binance has carried on to accumulate additional resources. Coinbase’s coffers have remained mostly unchanged as well.
The progress of DeFi might have also contributed to this phenomena. The amount of Bitcoin locked on Ethereum through wBTC as well as renBTC now surpasses 130,000. Just a couple of months before, these amounts were negligible. Another likely primary cause is institutional adoption. Aside from the steady progress of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust Fund, publicly-traded businesses like MicroStrategy and Square set about adding crypto assets to their treasuries.
It would seem that there is either a general trend towards owners withdrawing Bitcoin from custodial exchanges, or even maybe a couple of significant interchanges are merely sacrificing the trust of their clients. The latter might be a reasonable conclusion, as a simple three os’s (BitMEX, Huobi, and Bitfinex) had been to blame for the majority of the pattern – their balances decreased by 390,000 BTC, making them accountable for almost 80 % of the total decline.