The Evolution of the Digital Asset Market in 2018
Published in
6 min readJan 21, 2019
When Moon and when Lambo? Not in 2018!
To put it short — 2018 left a lot to be desired. Any planned trip to the moon had to be canceled and the drive back from the airfield was in an Uber. When the hype train of 2017 came to a standstill many investors felt that crypto is over. But is that really true?
To find out we crunched numbers of 178 digital asset exchanges* worldwide and arrived at the following key findings:
- US’s global market share dropped from 50% in Q2/17 to 7% in Q4/18,
- Asia now responsible for 81% of global digital asset trading,
- Fueled by a record Q1/18, 2018 global trading volumes are still twice as high as in 2017,
- 2018 digital asset volatilities are considerably lower than in 2017 but remain high compared to classical markets,
- Crypto-to-Crypto trading is rising; Tether USD (USDT) trading now 2.5 times higher than USD.
US’s Market Share Dwindles
On a global level, the average digital asset trading volume more than doubled from $2.4B/day in 2017 to $5.0B/day in 2018. However, in the US, trading volume…
