1/ This week I looked at exchange wallets. There are currently approximately 716k bitcoins (4% of circulation), 7M ether (7% of circulation) and 1.2b tether (64% of circulation) held in the publicly known wallets of crypto exchanges.
theblockcrypto.com/2019/01/09/ana…
theblockcrypto.com/2019/01/09/ana…
2/ It’s important to note that:
* the included exchanges could control even more wallets, which are not known
* some major exchanges including Coinbase and BitMEX do not have publicly known wallets so they are not included in this summary
* the included exchanges could control even more wallets, which are not known
* some major exchanges including Coinbase and BitMEX do not have publicly known wallets so they are not included in this summary
3/ Including even the non-public wallets, it is estimated that at least 10% of bitcoins and 15% of ether in circulation are currently stored at exchanges.
4/ The exchange wallet balances of bitcoin decreased by the average of nearly 6% from the beginning of early October. This could indicate that there are either lower levels of speculation or that customers are withdrawing cryptocurrencies to their own wallets.
5/ It can also be a good proxy for the success of exchanges since the deposited cryptocurrencies are often used for trading. If the balances are decreasing, it could indicate that the exchange is losing business.
6/ Similarly to bitcoin, the exchange wallet balances decreased by a little over 6% from the beginning of early October.
7/ Exchanges’ Tether holdings are interesting to track as well. Unsurprisingly, all of the tracked exchanges have decreased their Tether holdings significantly. On average, the exchanges have decreased their exposure to Tether by nearly 40%, way more than 6% for both BTC and ETH.
8/ When looking at the the holdings of BTC, ETH and USDT of exchange wallets and their perspective shares, Binance currently has the most in BTC, ETH and USDT - the equivalent of $1.5 billion.
9/ Followed by Huobi ($904M), Bitfinex ($824M), Bittrex ($708M) and Kraken ($570M). For all of the other exchanges, there is not enough publicly available data.
10/ Exchanges decreasing cryptocurrency holdings likely means that there is less speculation than there was 3 months ago. Since balances can’t be faked, they can also be used as a proxy to traded volume. Thus the trend of decreasing balances likely points to decreasing volume.
I must say, thought, that it is interesting that Coinbase is one of the only exchanges that doesn't have publicly known addresses of their cold wallets. Neither BTC or ETH. And since they moved 5% of all BTC and 8% of all ETH, it should be known. Anyone know their addresses?
