Data and Insights: No Spot for Trading

We’ve seen a slowdown in spot volumes in recent months as the crypto bear market ravages on. Crypto spot volumes fell to $9.01 billion on September 10th, dipping below the $10 billion threshold for the first time since November 2020. Binance Exchange experienced the biggest loss in volumes after stopping its zero-fee spot bitcoin trading promotion on its top trading pair BTC/USDT. Binance’s volume exceeded $280 million every month from January 2021 to April 2023 (often by a lot), but from May of this year to now, volumes have not exceeded $240 million.

Supply Curve

The total supply across all stablecoins has been declining, but crypto-collateralized stablecoins have been hardest hit, especially after the fall of UST back in May 2022. Since then, the supply across crypto-backed stablecoins fell from 15 billion to just over 6 billion this month, a 60% drop. However, Curve's crypto-backed stablecoin, crvUSD, is gaining traction after launching back in May. Its supply surpassed 700 million at the end of August, making it the second largest crypto-backed stablecoin after DAI. crvUSD has the brand of Curve (the second largest DEX on Ethereum by volume) attached to it, which could be helping to solidify its name in the stablecoin space.

Base's growing user base

Coinbase 's layer 2 network Base continues to see sustained growth, gaining over 720k new addresses a day since August 26th, putting the layer 2's total number of unique addresses at over 15 million. The 7-day moving average of transactions peaked at just under 900,000 at the end of August but has since sunk to 367,000. That being said, Base still remains comparable to Arbitrum and Optimism in terms of transactions.

The social platform friend.tech, one of Base’s breakout protocols, saw its metrics taper off last week but had a rebound over the weekend, with the protocol posting over 400,000 transactions on Sunday.

Searching Up

Number of pageviews on Bitcoin’s Wikipedia reached 7,830 on September 8th, the highest number of daily views in 2023. This could be attributed to the increased likelihood of a spot bitcoin ETF happening soon, leading people to search up Bitcoin and see what it's about.

Further, new accounting rules will let companies report the bitcoin on their balance sheets at fair market value which could see more companies looking to invest. Previous rules only accounted for price drops relative to the purchase price, not allowing anyone to account for gains on bitcoin holdings. This may have deterred firms from holding crypto.

Data & Insights is a weekly newsletter and article series by The Block Research Analyst Rebecca Stevens that highlights recent trends and top charts from?The Block’s Data Dashboard. Sign-up to receive Data & Insights in your inbox every Monday for free. Previous articles in the series are available with a subscription to The Block Pro.