How Binance Bucks the Trend With its Higher Trading Volumes

The major crypto exchange Binance has bucked the trend when it comes to trading volumes during the bear market, recording a sharp increase in volume on popular trading pairs even as crypto prices have plummeted.

The rise in trading volume on Binance has followed a move by the exchange to eliminate trading fees on some of its most popular bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) pairs earlier this year, leading to a surge in activity on the platform. Binance first launched a zero-fee promotion on certain BTC pairs in July, before it followed up by also removing trading fees on popular ETH pairs in August this year.

According to Binance’s announcement from August, fees on ETH trading were removed “to ensure everyone has the opportunity to buy and sell ETH with minimum barriers to entry.”

As everyone who has been around the crypto market for a few years knows, trading volumes always fall during bear markets. And the longer the bear market lasts, the more volume can be expected to fall, as traders simply lose interest in trying to profit from crypto.

Despite this, the surge in volume seen on Binance in recent months has been so strong that aggregated volume across exchanges for the most liquid BTC and ETH pairs during this bear market has held up. However, when removing Binance from the group of exchanges that make up the aggregated volume, it becomes clear that it is this exchange alone that has kept aggregated volumes up.

This observation was also pointed to by crypto researcher Kaiko, which in a newsletter from Monday noted the “strong divergence” in activity between Binance and 13 other large crypto exchanges.

As previously reported by Cryptonews.com, the removal of trading fees on some pairs on Binance did lead to a problem of so-called wash trading. According to Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, some traders took advantage of the fee-free trading to try to gain VIP status on the exchange, which in turn forced the exchange to remove those incentives.

“Think this is due to zero fees and people trying to gain VIP tiers. We will exclude BTC trading from VIP calculations. Remove all incentives to wash trade,” CZ said at the time.