In October, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) reached a new all-time high (ATH) in terms of volume. This comes at a time when the crypto market has experienced significant volatility. Let’s take a closer look at these figures.
DEXs achieve an ATH in volume in October
Earlier this morning, we looked back at the particularly notable performance of stablecoins amid uncertainty in the crypto market. Beyond this asset class, another sector performed particularly well in October, namely decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
And with good reason, because while the tokens associated with these DEXs did not particularly stand out, volumes reached a monthly all-time high (ATH) in October, at $614.27 billion:
According to DefiLlama data as of October 31, the cumulative volume of DEXs was $11.15 trillion. As such, it is interesting to note that October represented 5.5% of the historical volume.
In the protocol rankings, Uniswap (UNI) is in the lead, with nearly $70 billion in volume ahead of PancakeSwap (CAKE), its closest competitor:
Still on the subject of Uniswap, the app also achieved an ATH in terms of volume in October. With nearly $170.9 billion, this represents 27.82% of the activity generated by all DEXs during the month of October.
As significant as they are, these figures are still not comparable to the activity of centralized platforms. For Binance, for example, CoinGecko data reports that the spot volume for the last 24 hours was $31.57 billion. In just one day, this is already higher than what Uniswap achieved in the last seven days.
While some sectors are heavily dependent on optimism in the crypto market, it is interesting to note that DEXs can see their activity skyrocket in both upward and downward trends. October saw both an ATH for BTC and a significant crash across the entire market, so it makes sense that this volatility benefited DEXs. Nevertheless, they can suffer during periods of wait-and-see attitudes, as is usually the case during troughs in the middle of a bear market.
