Just in one night, Ethereum trading volumes jumped to $8 billion and continue to grow at the moment of publishing, while the bitcoin market has about $6 billion.

The culprit of what is happening is one Asian exchange, using an innovative model to stimulate traders’ activity.

It’s hard to recall when Ethereum outdistanced Bitcoin in terms of trading volume for the last time. It probably was the spring of 2017.

Anyway, the point is that about 75% of this figure falls on the ETH/USDT pair of EXX exchange. At the same time, bitcoin is almost 10 times less popular on it.

Why Ethereum? Why USDT? Is China opening smart contracts for itself after a few months of domination in requests, related to the Solidity programming language? Or did they find a way to circumvent restrictions on cryptocurrency trading by the People’s Bank of China?

The EXX mining model partly answers the questions, but the main question remains open: Why Ethereum?

On their new exchanges, entrepreneurs with Chinese roots have recently started to use the “Commission mining” model, which is already very popular and, apparently, is bearing fruit, but it does not make it less controversial.

These exchanges compensate users’ expenses related to covering commissions for trading Bitcoins or Ethereum with their own tokens, in this case with EXX tokens.

Previously, due to the use of commission mining, a flurry of criticism was brought on by the FCoin exchange. Users assume that traders who carry out transactions on it resort to the help of bots, and the only purpose of their activity is to obtain tokens of the exchange. CEO of Binance Changpeng Zhao went further and said that the exchange would carry out manipulations to economically justify the used model.

The CoinMarketCap website also drew attention to the appearance of such trading platforms. It decided to make changes in the way of accounting trading volume in order to respond to the latest changes in the market. However, the experience of EXX and other similar exchanges shows that their impact on the formation of the cryptocurrency landscape is not over yet.