Bitcoin much bigger than Binance or Coinbase, says BTC promoter: BTC Prague

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Amid the panic over lawsuits against major cryptocurrency exchanges, a Bitcoin (BTC) advocate has argued that the BTC market is much larger than what exchanges follow.

The total Bitcoin market is not limited to Binance, Coinbase or any other crypto exchange, Jan3 CEO Samson Mow told Cointelegraph at the BTC conference in Prague on June 9.

Whereas I think for bitcoin it is much more difficult to quantify market share. That’s because a lot of bitcoin transactions are block transactions, Mow said.

When mentioning Bitcoin block exchanges, Mow referred to private trading channels that allow investors to trade privately and place large orders to buy or sell BTC. Some of these channels include peer-to-peer (P2P) or over-the-counter (OTC) offerings, he noted, adding:

You kind of have this black box around Bitcoin. Not sure how total the market is. If Bitcoin operates as P2P, you are not going to quantifiably measure the amount of Bitcoin being traded.

This is because private Bitcoin trading channels like P2P or OTC are not included in the total BTC trading volumes on major crypto tracking websites like CoinGecko. This means that daily Bitcoin trading volume is actually over $9.6 billion recorded at the time of writing.

CoinGecko only tracks transactions that occur on crypto exchanges and does not track transactions that occur on P2P platforms and brokerages, said Bobby Ong, Co-Founder and COO of CoinGecko , to Cointelegraph.

P2P platforms include places like Binance P2P, Huobi P2P, Paxful, Remitano, etc., the executive noted. CoinGecko has no plans to follow these platforms in the near future, Ong noted.

Related: Binance.US Halts Trading of Dozens of USDT, BTC, BUSD Pairs Amid SEC Lawsuit

Outside of P2P, CoinGecko also does not log institutional transactions on OTC, Ong said, adding:

Institutional transactions that occur on the exchanges we track are logged. OTC transactions are not logged as it is like a P2P transaction but between large entities.

The new remarks from the CEO of Jan3 may imply that cryptocurrency exchange tycoons like Binance or Coinbase might not dominate the Bitcoin market as much as some might think.

In January 2023, Norwegian crypto research firm K33 Research, formerly known as Arcane Research, reported that Binance was running 92% of the Bitcoin spot market in 2022. No matter how you see it in terms of trading business, Binance is the crypto market, the company wrote at the time.

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