Conversation

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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.

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