The trend is starting to reverse – Centralized exchanges have seen huge amounts of cryptocurrency accumulate in recent years. This movement seems to be reversing in recent months, and the war chest of crypto-exchanges is starting to melt visibly.
Almost 2 million BTC concentrated on 5 platforms
Centralized platforms continue for the moment to concentrate an impressive number of bitcoins (BTC) .
The 5 largest crypto exchanges – Coinbase , Huobi , Binance , OKEx and Kraken – alone hold a total of 1.96 million BTC according to the Chain.info site . A jackpot of around $ 22.7 billion at the current price, which is 10.6% of all bitcoin mined so far.
In detail, it is Coinbase which is the richest platform in bitcoins, since it manages almost 945,000 BTC for its customers.
It is followed quite far behind by Huobi and Coinbase , with nearly 324,000 and 290,000 bitcoins respectively .
The 5 crypto exchanges with the most bitcoins (BTC) under their management
Growing bitcoin leaks
Is it because of the massive arrival of decentralized finance (DeFi) and / or a renewed interest in decentralized exchanges (DEX) ? In any case, for several months, centralized platforms have seen a large part of their bitcoins go to individual wallets .
This movement was initiated at the beginning of the period of health crisis of the coronavirus in March , when the cryptomonnaies market experienced the violent crash of „Black Thursday“ .
While centralized crypto-exchanges had nearly 2.95 million bitcoins at that time, every month since has seen a little more BTC disappear.
According to Glassnode data , they now only have 2.25 million BTC under their management. A leak of 700,000 bitcoins (nearly $ 8 billion ) in just over 6 months .
Evolution of the number of bitcoins held by centralized platforms
Even if they remain of course unavoidable for now, centralized crypto exchanges seem to be experiencing a certain loss of interest. While the many hacking stories weren’t right, it would appear that DeFi’s interest rates and cash pools (like Uniswap) are more appealing to crypto investors.