Binance CEO: We Don’t Know Real Volume of the Crypto Market

The cryptocurrency over-the-counter (OTC) market might be no less than the online reported volumes on CoinMarketCap, a popular cryptocurrency market data provider, according to Changpeng Zhao, CZ, the CEO of the major exchange Binance.

“What I’ve heard is, the OTC market is at least as large as the online reported volumes, so there’s at least 50% of volumes that’s not been reported on CoinMarketCap. But we’re not heavy into that business, so we don’t know the real volumes,” CZ said in an interview with CNBC’s “Crypto Trader.”

At the time of writing, the 24 hour trading volume for top 5 largest cryptocurrencies stands at almost USD 7 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

Supporting CZ’s statement, an April 2018 report by the Tabb Group, the international research and consulting firm focused exclusively on capital markets, suggests that OTC trading accounted for a daily volume of USD 12 billion worth of BTC earlier this year. At the same time, over USD 5.1 billion of online trading was reported on CoinMarketCap.

CZ also responded to the decreasing trading volume on Binance (minus 32% in October compared to September). According to him, “business goes okay” despite the drop. Compared to January 2018, they now only have the tenth of January’s trading volume. However, Binance is trading “huge volumes” (USD 521 million in the past 24 hours) compared to one or two years ago, the CEO said.

“When there’s no movement in price, people will trade less, so that’s kind of understandable,” CZ stated. “The volume here is now great, and there have always been hundreds of exchanges in our space or even thousands of exchanges.”

According to CZ, both new users and the amount of cryptocurrency Binance is holding is increasing steadily.

“If you look at our core wallets, the amount of BTC we hold, we have just seen an increase in people depositing Bitcoins to our exchange, and the same thing [with] almost all the cryptocurrencies we hold,” he said.

CZ added that Binance’s increasing crypto deposits is a “very good sign,” indicating healthy behavior from the exchange’s users.
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Watch the whole interview with CZ below: