According to a report by blockchain analysis company 0xScope, Binance, while still the market leader in cryptocurrency exchanges, has lost around 10% market share to competitors such as OKX, Upbit, Bitget or MEXC. As a hypothetical bull run seems to be brewing, CEXs will have to redouble their efforts to pull ahead.
Binance continues to lose ground on the CEX market
While the hypothesis of an upcoming bull market is gradually taking shape, notably through the narrative of Bitcoin spot ETFs, the ecosystem of cryptocurrency exchange platforms seems to have been undergoing continuous mutation since the start of 2023.
According to a report by blockchain analysis firm 0xScope published on Monday November 6, the CEX landscape is being redrawn in favor of exchanges such as Upbit, OKX, Bitget or MEXC, where giant Binance is struggling to slow its descent in terms of market share.
Indeed, the 0xScope report highlights the loss of momentum of Changpeng Zhao’s platform, which has surrendered around 10% market share across all indicators, although it still dominates the market with over 51% of total trading volume.
Market shares of the main centralized crypto exchanges
As we can see from the chart above, Binance is followed by OKX in terms of volume handled, an exchange whose growth is proving particularly noteworthy. During the week of October 17, OKX accounted for 16.1% of total trading volume, compared with just 10.5% a year earlier.
According to the 0xScope report, Binance’s spot market share has fallen significantly over the past year, from 62% in October 2022 to just 40% in October 2023, a drop of over 20%.
On this metric, South Korean exchange Upbit stands out, with a gain of 5% over the same period. Upbit managed to maintain a spot trading market share of over 10% for the whole of October.
Evolution of crypto volume traded on major CEXs (weekly)
Soon as many users on OKX as on Binance?
If we now turn to the number of deposit addresses on the various CEXs, we can see several things. Firstly, Binance and Coinbase together account for over 60% of the deposit addresses on the entire ecosystem of centralized crypto exchanges.
Secondly, if we look at the number of active deposit addresses, we can see that this is much lower on Coinbase compared to its number of registered deposit addresses. This number is however higher at Binance, but we can see that it has drastically increased since April 2023 at OKX :
Percentage of active deposit addresses on major crypto CEX
What’s more, Coinbase and Binance are both seeing their share of new deposit addresses fall steadily, an observation to be attributed to the historical dominance of the 2 CEXs. Note that on OKX, the number of new deposit addresses is constantly increasing, although it is possible to create multiple addresses on the same user account on this exchange.
Finally, on a metric to be treated with more distance, Binance occupies an increasingly smaller share in terms of followers on X, whereas OKX has seen its number of followers almost triple in the last year.
