According to a report dated January 14 by a research company, Diar, the cryptocurrency exchanges have finished the year of 2018 with exceptionally high “record transacting volumes.”
In contrast to the year 2017, the year 2018 saw a rise in both – the number of trades as well as to its volume. In spite of the increase in the types of digital assets available in the current year of 2019, the research company has forecasted that the year will still witness a decline in these numbers for the spot markets.
The statistics of Diar portray that the overall volume of trade of the USD markets on Coinbase, one of the dominant crypto exchange of the US, grew by 21 percent in 2018 when compared to the year 2017. During the same period, exchanges like Kraken and Bitfinex rose by 192 percent and 50 percent respectively.
Furthermore, Coinbase presumably accounted a 14.1 percent hike in the number of trades, that is, it grew from 82.7 million transactions in 2017 to 94.4 million transactions in the year 2018.
The Bitcoin mining process all round the year was extensively followed by Diar. The statistics revealed that revenues earned through Bitcoin mining went over $5.8 billion in the year 2018. The miners started the year on a cracking note with the Miners of Bitcoin making a profit of $1.2 billion in January alone. But this progress was short-lived as the monthly figures slide down by 83 percent during the course of the year, clocking an overall profit of $210 million was accomplished in the entire year.
At the commencement of 2018, various mining pools controlled by the producer of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), Bitmain, along with ViaBTC pool managed control over 53 percent of Bitcoin network’s hash rate. The number fell in 2019, and these said mining pools commenced the current year with a mere 39 percent of the network’s hash rate.
Diar justifies that the transfer of power held by a few dominant pools to a larger number of minor ones will act as a key reason to facilitate the network’s security from possible attacks. Dior quoted that pools led by BTC.com have lost the privilege of being a major power and thus are not likely to encounter an incident. Diar stated “Unknown miners closed December having solved a whopping 22 percent of the total blocks up from 6 percent at the start of last year. The Bitcoin network is currently less likely to experience an attack given the fact the BTC.com controlled pools have lost dominance over the network.”
Earlier in December, Dior had reported that institutional investors have started dealing in over-the-counter (OTC) physical BTC markets which ensure greater liquidity. In the year 2018, Coinbase witnessed a 20 percent rise in BTC trade volume at the time of OTC market hours, in contrast to Grayscale’s Bitcoin Investment Trust which saw a fall of 35 percent in its volumes in 2018, when compared to 2017.
