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CCData’s quarterly Outlook Report provides readers with a comprehensive, data-driven analysis of the digital asset landscape. This report reflects on the key events of the previous quarter while casting an eye towards the future, pinpointing emerging trends and potential developments in the coming months and beyond.
Overall, 2023 has been a pivotal year for digital assets, marked by a surge in institutional adoption, regulatory progress, and numerous technological advancements. Ripple’s legal victory, the rise of spot Bitcoin ETFs, the EU’s MiCA framework, and the adoption of tokenisation, highlight not just a changing sentiment towards digital assets, but also demonstrate the increasing attention and involvement from institutional players. Continue reading below as we highlight the top trends of the year, and what to expect in 2024.
The fourth quarter of 2022 was a pivotal moment for digital assets, marked by the collapse of FTX and subsequent scrutiny of the industry. Despite this, Bitcoin (BTC) and the wider digital asset industry showed resilience from the start of 2023, with BTC posting impressive returns of 156% YTD, outperforming other notable assets.
There has also been a noticeable uptick in speculative activities, as evidenced by the record-high open interest in futures and options on centralised exchanges. This peak in speculative interest marks a significant trend in the market. In 2023, futures open interest on centralised exchanges rose from $6.07bn to $11.4bn, an increase of 87.8%.
In 2023, the continued institutionalisation of the industry can be seen via CME, which is considered the top derivatives platform for institutions to speculate on BTC futures. In November, CME’s BTC open interest totalled $4.1bn, exceeding Binance’s $3.8bn OI figure to become the top derivatives exchange in the industry for the first time since October 2021 for BTC futures trading activity.
A clear uptrend can also be seen when looking at assets under management (AUMs) across popular crypto products. Out of twelve monthly periods, ten demonstrated MoM gains. YTD, aggregated AUMs have grown by more than 150%, from $19bn at the end of December 2022 to $49bn as of the 10th of December.
Following the downtrend that has lasted nearly a year, trading volumes on centralised exchanges had hit multi-year lows, recording Q3 2023 as the lowest quarterly volume since the last quarter of 2020. These low volumes often mark the end of a market cycle as volatility returns to the market along with price appreciation as seen in Q4 2023.
The centralised exchange landscape has seen large structural shifts in 2023. There was a trend in the consolidation of the market share to Binance, following the collapse of FTX. However, upon reaching an all-time high market share of 62.6% in February, Binance’s dominance has since waned, falling for 10 consecutive months to 42.7% — its lowest since February 2022. OKX and Bybit have been the two largest beneficiaries of Binance’s decline, partly due to their strong position in the derivatives market.
Visit our website here to download the full 2023 Q4 Outlook Report and learn more about the topics covered above, alongside even more analysis of DeFi ecosystems, centralised exchanges post FTX, macroeconomics and much, much more!
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CCData’s suite of market-leading trade, order book, blockchain, social, and historical data, spanning thousands of cryptocurrencies and 300+ exchanges, is also available via our API here: https://developers.cryptocompare.com/
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