Conversation

12) The crash was three times as big as last year, with roughly $10B of liquidations and hundreds of billions of volume. Last time, crypto came dangerously close to ending. This time... everything's ok, more or less.

181

13) Why? Partially it's a lower _percentage_ decrease in price. But also partially: *No one in crypto tried to build a business that blows out if BTC goes down to $50k.*

156

14) No matter your long-term outlook, touching $50k was totally possible. We were there a few weeks ago! Even people who were "irresponsibly long" generally made more in the run-up to $50k than the lost in the crash down to it.

128

15) So market cap was down, but the industry kept running as usual, and no one really worried too much. And, partially because of that, BTC is already back up more than halfway from the bottom. The liquidations are over.

114

16) Once again, FTX had a record day, with $30B in volume. (See March 12th on that graph? What is that, volume for ants?)

250

17) But this time, we could take a step back and reflect, because the industry wasn't on fire (and neither was the world!) FTX wasn't on fire, either. Last year, FTX, like most exchanges, had significant downtime. It took weeks to go through the support backlog from 3/12.

117

18) This time, FTX has 0 downtime, and in fact set its new record low for latency thanks to recent improvements. The industry, in general, handled it much better. But FTX in particular has grown a lot in the last year.

228

19) FTX's volume/etc. are up about 8000% in the last year, the fastest of any major exchange. Even since the end of 2020, though, FTX has grown the fastest.

190

20) Spot exchanges are *extremely* correlated with net crypto inflows/buying. When people are taking USD --> BTC, Coinbase and Kraken do great. When people are going back and forth, derivatives exchanges do better. Q1 was *great* for Coinbase, and Kraken: unprecedented inflows.

106

1:13 PM · Apr 19, 2021Twitter Web App

21) So does that mean Q2 will be bad? Not really -- their volume is about the same as Q1, maybe down a bit. But other exchanges are up, a lot; about 1.5-2x in April!

Replying to

22) ....so where are things going? I don't know! It depends on what the future of crypto looks like, and crypto exchanges. Are they primarily institutions that let people turn fiat into BTC? Or are they core clearinghouses for transactions, risk, deltas, and capital?

23) We'll get more details, too, as financials roll out.

@FTX_Official

's run-rate added another digit in April. I'm guessing that

@binance

's is up quite a bit, too. And a bunch of other exchanges are crushing it locally (e.g.

in Korea).

24) Finally, earlier I posted a mystery graph; the most common guess was "DOGE volume". Which isn't quite right, but also isn't a coincidence. DOGE does turn out to have been the largest driver of the graph historically.

128