CCData's weekly ‘Chart of the Week’ highlights topical digital asset developments with vital commentary and analysis.
This week's COTW examines the relationship between centralised (CEX) and decentralised exchange (DEX) volumes since 2021.
So far in November, CEX market share stands at 90.3%, slightly above the yearly average of 89.6%.
Interestingly, DEX volumes have soared to a record $292.54bn, reflecting a surge in on-chain activity.
Yet, despite this growth, CEXs remain firmly dominant as speculative activity picks up, driven by BTC’s approach to the $100k milestone.
While CEX market share has declined from 97.7% in January 2021 to its current level, the shift has been gradual, with dominance fluctuating between 88–91% in recent years.
This highlights the enduring strength of centralised platforms, even as decentralised alternatives gain traction.
This week’s Chart of the Week highlights May’s correlation of daily returns between BTC, ETH and the SP500, falling to 15.8% and 18.2%, respectively, the lowest level since August 2022.
Digital assets have benefitted from a significant price appreciation following signs that tight monetary policy and high interest rates may soon reach their peak. This comes after the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, causing a stir in the banking system, and amplifying the interest in digital assets.
The depegging of USDC and regulatory issues with BUSD has led to Binance converting $1 billion of their Industry Recovery Initiative funds to BTC, ETH, and BNB, triggering further buy pressure for digital assets.
This week's Chart of the Week highlights Ethereum's (ETH) underperformance against Bitcoin (BTC), with the ETH/BTC ratio reaching its lowest point since April 21st 2021, at 0.044. When ETH was previously at this level in 2021, it was rallying dramatically against BTC, driven by the previous bull market and declining BTC dominance during alt season. Recently, Ethereum has not maintained this momentum in comparison to Bitcoin, even with the recent introduction of Ethereum-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
So far, Ether Spot ETF flows have observed a net outflow of roughly -$461mn, highlighting the difficult start faced by Ethereum which has only been exacerbated by the recent market downturn.
In this week’s Chart of the Week, we look at the historical market cap of Binance Coin (BNB) and Solana (SOL). In the past week, SOL has flipped BNB to become the fourth largest coin cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $84.8bn to BNB’s $83.8bn. This comes after a year of increased competition between the currencies, with SOL crossing BNB nine days across four separate instances.
In 2023, SOL seemed nowhere near this feat, and only managed to flip BNB one time in the last days of December. However, both coins had sharp increases from the beginning of this year, SOL with 79.32% and BNB by 69.44%, which has led to the narrowing gap between their market caps. Increased activity on SOL can be attributed to the recent launch of an ETH ETF in the U.S.. The early success of the ETF will increase confidence and excitement for an impending SOL ETF which VanEck filed to list in late June.
In this week's Chart of the Week, we examine Ethereum’s market cap from its inception to the present day.
As we approach the 9th anniversary of the Ethereum mainnet rollout, its market cap hovers around $400bn, reflecting Ethereum's journey from a nascent blockchain project to a dominant force in the cryptocurrency space.
The launch of spot Ethereum ETFs in the U.S. joins a long line of exciting innovations and technological advancements which have driven the market cap.
On the day of the announcement, ETH accounted for 16.9% of the total market cap, down from 21.7% on November 11, 2021, when the coin recorded its peak market cap of $568bn.
In this Week’s Charts of the Week, we look at how the ETF news has influenced Ethereum's price over the past few months.
After reaching recent lows against Bitcoin and experiencing a period of minor swings in both price and open interest, Ethereum surged following the announcement of a potential ETF approval on May 23, 2024. The price recorded an increase of approximately 20%. Its open interest also surged to 8 million, increasing by about 60% since the beginning of the month.
Yesterday, Bloomberg analysts announced that the ETFs are expected to start trading next week. This news has once again ignited Ethereum's market activity, as evidenced by a marked increase in trading volumes and open interest which soared by 77% and 5.5%in the last 24 hours.
This latest development continues to underscore the impact of ETF news on the market behaviour of digital assets, mirroring the trends observed with Bitcoin.
In this week’s Chart of the Week, we examine the significant rise in open interest for Bitcoin on centralised exchanges, which has nearly doubled compared to what it was in January.
Over the past month, however, open interest on Bitcoin has dropped from $30bnto $24bn following the recent market downturn which caused significant liquidations. The events that likely contributed to this downturn in open interest are the looming Mt. Gox repayments and the German government moving massive quantities of Bitcoin onto centralised exchanges.
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