The fallout from the March Bitcoin crash continues as Bitmex loses more ground to rival futures exchange Binance in terms of market share.
According to Crypto analytics firm Coin Metrics, the world’s third-largest crypto exchange is still reeling from the Black Thursday crash and has continued losing in both open interest and volume for Bitcoin (BTC) futures.
A closer look at Coin Metric data reveals even more worrying details for Bitmex. Their share of open interest fell from above 35% in mid-March to nearly 25% in mid-April. BitMEX’s share of market volume also dropped from about 25% to below 20%.
The Black Thursday crash, which saw Bitcoin’s price fall almost 50% in seven days, was seen as a dark day for many but not the worst in history. However, whenever these major disturbances happen there are winners and losers.
Binance it seems is the winner, as their new futures exchange now tops the market by trading volume and has seen $2.8 billion in 24-hour Bitcoin futures volumes, outweighing rivals Huobi and Bitmex significantly.
Rather ironically now, Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao commented following the March crash calling it a “bloodbath”, but now it would seem Binance’s futures is bathing in something sweeter. Their open interest share of the market gained 15% in the month following the crash.
It would appear that Binance is leading the field in futures and this could be a significant moment for the history of futures exchanges in the industry. The Coin Metric report noted this fact, saying:
“Since the crash, there has been a reshuffling of the top futures marketplaces for crypto assets with BitMEX losing some of its market share to Binance. This may have an on-going impact across crypto markets, especially considering BitMEX’s outsized influence on price discovery.”
This has been a remarkable rise for Binance, with their futures exchange gaining such ground on its competitors. In early March, Binance faced some malfunction issues and were forced to halt trading on the futures exchange.
Speaking to CoinTelegraph last month, Aaron Gong, Binance Futures vice President, spoke on these issues but looked to assure users they could still be trusted, saying: “Whilst there were issues of system overloads, outages, glitches, and even rollbacks elsewhere, we’ve proven time and again to be a safe, reliable, cheap and liquid venue for hedging.”
As for BitMEX, it will be interesting if they can return to previous levels and be a challenger to Binance long term. It would seem that in this current climate this could be problematic.
