During the BTC Prague 2023 conference, Jan3 CEO Samson Mow suggested that the Bitcoin market is much larger than what is tracked by exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Mow argued that the total Bitcoin market is not limited to these exchanges, as a lot of trades are block trades conducted through private trading channels such as peer-to-peer (P2P) or over-the-counter (OTC) deals. This makes it difficult to quantify how much of the market Bitcoin represents.
Mow’s comments highlight the fact that the Bitcoin market is more extensive than what is recorded by major crypto tracking websites like CoinGecko, which only tracks trades happening on crypto exchanges and does not track trades happening on P2P platforms and brokerages. P2P platforms include places like Binance P2P, Huobi P2P, Paxful, and Remitano, among others, and CoinGecko has no plans to track such platforms in the near future.
Apart from P2P, CoinGecko also doesn’t record institutional trades on OTC, which means that Bitcoin’s daily trading volume is likely much larger than the $9.6 billion recorded at the time of writing. Mow’s remarks imply that cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase might not dominate the Bitcoin market as much as some people think.
This is not the first time that concerns have been raised about the dominance of certain exchanges in the cryptocurrency market. In January 2023, Norwegian crypto research firm K33 Research (formerly Arcane Research) stated that Binance handled 92% of the Bitcoin spot market in 2022. However, Mow’s comments suggest that Bitcoin’s market is much more significant than what is recorded by exchanges and tracking websites. Private trading channels like P2P and OTC deals play a crucial role in Bitcoin trading and are likely to continue to do so in the future.
Source: Cointelegraph
