Trading volume on crypto giant Upbit collapses

The trading volume of altcoins, these cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, fell by 75% in one month on the Korean crypto exchange.

Are we seeing a cold spell around altcoins? This is what seems to be emerging if we are to believe the figures from Upbit, the Korean cryptocurrency exchange platform founded in 2017, which is seeing its volumes collapse.

Investors often look at it as a barometer of activity around these cryptocurrencies in which we invest when we want to stay away from big flows on major cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether.

However, there is cause for concern: we had an all-time high with daily volumes of more than $15 billion on March 5, including an all-time high in capitalization on altcoins at $788 billion. Since then it has no longer been the same trend. At the last daily reading, we are barely at $3.75 billion in volumes, which is equivalent to a 75% drop in volumes in a few weeks, reports Coindesk.

Alongside Binance, two global crypto platforms are in vogue: the South Korean exchange Upbit and the Seychelles-based OKX. Last March, Upbit confirmed its place as the second largest crypto exchange in the world, with 7% market share and a monthly trading volume of $64 billion.

Spring cleaning among investors

This proves that investors are sorting things out after having had a lot of fun with “meme coins”, like the shiba inu or the pepe coin, all these somewhat fragile and very speculative projects.

While this has the merit of cleaning up the market and making it more liquid for large caps making their transition to financialization, the situation could start to become complicated for all the small developing cryptocurrencies. In this context, this signal from Upbit is not encouraging.