Nearly 50% exchange users were thru recommendation by friends

Christopher Ryan
4 min readOct 9, 2018

Cryptocurrency market is always changing. A few months ago, mining competition held by exchanges has been completely vanished. The cryptocurrency exchange right now seems to have entered the intermission with the occasional rights period. In recent, a survey jointly released by the European exchange Decoin and PANews resulted somewhat unexpected.

70% of users are satisfied with current exchanges, nearly half are recommended by friends

The survey was set up in a blockchain community of nearly 40,000 users. The effective questionnaires collected showed that 72.7% have used exchanges;. the rest of participants who have never used exchanges were accounted for 27.93% of the total. It also showed that 70.77% participants were satisfied with current exchanges. 17.17% were dissatisfied with the exchanges they have used, and 12.06% were neutral.

Significantly, 49.88% of exchange users were recommended by friends. Others were thru internet search engines, accounted for 28.54%; 13.46% were recommended by internet personalities and 8.12% by cryptocurrency issuers. According to Decoin CEO Shay Perry, the circle of cryptocurrency investors looks more like an organizational community. The members prefer the recommendations by other members in common, than by the internet personalities on Youtube or somewhere else.

Among the participants, the users of Huobi was accounted for 44.31%, Binance for 32.11% and OKEx for 24.58%. They attract the vast majority of traders. Then FCoin, Bitfinex and Bitmumb were 12.21%, 10.37% and 7.19%, respectively. The rest use other exchanges. (Some participants have been using multiple exchanges at the same time.)

Moreover, 49.50% of participants said releasing exchange tokens (such as Huobi Token and Binance Coin what are used as medium for trade in specific exchange) for dividends would effectively motivate users to adopt an exchange. 43.31% prefer transaction dividends and 32.61% prefer repurchase.

Licensing is more concerned

What are users most concerned with exchanges? Security is mostly and firstly concerned, then the convenience and the extents of trading volume. The survey shows 76.87% of participants worry the security issues of the wallets provided by exchanges and they hope to use a safer platform. The participants have also paid attention to transaction fees, the number of trading pairs and customer service.

Financial Services Agency in Japan

One of the important indicators to judge the security extents of an exchange is whether the exchange received a local finance license. The survey indicates that up to 90.47% of participants are more reassured about licensed exchanges whereas 9.53% think it doesn’t matter. Shay Perry analyzed that transaction security was the main factor and secondary was convenience. These two factors are the core competition strength for cryptocurrency exchanges.

Nearly 60% of major coins holders own exchange tokens

Bitcoin has the largest market dominance but not the wildest among the survey. The survey shows 36.89% of participants have major altcoins and accounted for the largest proportion of their total assets, whereas 32.71% have Bitcoin accounted for the largest proportion. That is, 69.60% of people mostly hold major altcoins and Bitcoin. 15.31% hold exchange tokens as main, and 15.08% hold less-known altcoins. (In passage, major altcoins were defined as the coins that issued after Bitcoin, including Bitcoin’s derivative Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and derivative Ethereum Classic, Ripple, EOS and Litecoin. However, Tether is not counted here since it represents stablecoins but it indeed takes big proportion in survey.)

In fact, investors are more optimistic about the exchange tokens. In the survey, 59.86% of participants already have exchange tokens. 24.59% of potential investors are seeking to invest in appropriate exchange tokens in the future. Thus 84.45% participants keeps positive sentiment for exchange tokens whereas 15.55% never intend to hold.

Surprisingly, up to 80% of participants considered, or are considering leverage contracts. 46.4% said they would adopt leverage, and 39.91% might in future. The proportion of investors who used and potentially to use leverage has reached up 86.31%. The rest, 13.69% never considered to adopt the leverage contract.

At the end of the survey, many users suggested the exchange to strengthen the knowledge of trading and to provide more derivatives. In general, even though the market experienced great downtrend led by the falling of Bitcoin price, it has yet wiped out investors positive sentiment.

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