Today I want to look at Hive exchanges from a different perspective. Instead of looking at at how much trading volume is there, how much Hive they are holding, or how much Hive is deposited and withdrawn, I simply want to ask what exchanges do most Hivers actually use?
Some Hive traders likely do not have a Hive account at all. A small number of whales can also make up the vast majority of trading volume or transfer volume, so it's not necessarily a reflection of what our users by and large are doing. As such, I present the charts below.
The first chart shows the number of unique depositors per exchange per day, from the very beginning of Steem. You can see that in the pre-2018 days Poloniex and Bittrex were king, then post Steem bubble @blocktrades was the most popular for at least a couple of years. After the Hive exodus hard fork in 2020 we are clearly dominated by Binance, then @orinoco the Venezuelan OTC exchange, and @honey-swap which represents the Hive-Engine DEX.
I used a very large dataset and this is the most readable I could make the chart with per-day data. I may add some comments tomorrow with per-month data that I expect to be more readable.
Here is the same chart since the 2020 Hive exodus hard fork.
Above you can more clearly see how Binance, followed by Orinoco and then Honey-Swap are the leaders today in terms of how many Hivers use them.
Observations
Upbit and Bithumb dominate Hive financially which you can see if you follow the posts made by @arcange and @penguinpablo and others, they make by far the most trade volume and hold the most Hive. They likely have the most influence on the actual price of Hive.
But in terms of the users of Hive and which exchanges they prefer, it is a very different story. We can especially see that OTC exchanges like Orinoco and Blocktrades have always been popular, and Binance is far more popular than the Korean exchanges among Hivers. The growth in popularity of a Hive DEX is also quite clear to see in recent years.
Ionomy is not there?
I likely have missed some. I know there are some smaller regional OTC exchanges that I have missed but I didn't keep track of their account names. I used the list of the top accounts by value + my own memory to find the top exchanges.
If people add any exchange accounts I have missed I can make an updated chart that includes them.
Edit: I just did a query and it looks like between 1 and 10 users are using them every day though it used to be a lot more. I can still include them on an updated chart.
😂 , I might be one of them
I use Binance myself but, just for buying. Although, I wouldn't trust CZ as far as I could throw him I have KYCed there and hate to have to do it on another exchange.
I use coinbase to deposit one of the available swaps in hive engine when I want to buy hive and would do the reverse if I wanted to sell.
Well @demotruk your analyzes are very important, in any case Hive is and will continue to be a source of income that attracts a lot of attention, since many people worldwide largely depend on Hive. Thank you for your effective and motivating information.