Monthly Web Traffic for Major Bitcoin Exchanges Falls by Half

The disappointing price performances of the cryptocurrency markets in January and February have apparently driven many bitcoin traders to avoid checking on their exchange accounts. Estimations of the total number of visits to the trading venues based on web traffic show a sharp decline month over month.

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Exchange Traffic Takes a Nosedive

The total number of visits at the websites of major bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges has crashed in February. Generally speaking, looking across over a dozen top exchanges, web traffic seems to have peaked in December 2017 or January 2018 and fallen off by half in February, reaching a similar or lower number of visits to that of November 2017 for each website.

According to market intelligence tool Similarweb, the total number of visits at Coinbase was down 49% in February, from 123.5 million to 63.1 million, after reaching 169.5 million in December 2017. Kraken saw a decline of 56%, from 31.7 million in January to 13.8 million in February. Binance experienced a drop of 54%, from a peak of 191.5 million to just 87.3 million. Bitfinex was down 48% in February with just 18.3 million visits, compared with 35.4 million in January and 59.3 million in December 2017.

BTC Transactions Down

The obvious factor that could have caused this sharp fall in the number of visits to bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges is the weak price performance of all major cryptocurrencies in the first two months of 2018. In addition to that, the massive price rally of 2017 probably brought in a record number of new investors to the ecosystem in December, setting a very high bar that the following months failed to measure up.

The web traffic data also seems to corroborate the assumption that the similar sharp drop in the number of bitcoin transactions is due to less usage and adoption rather than just exchange batching hiding the total figure. As we reported at the time, by late February we saw just under 200,000 bitcoin transactions a day on average compared with almost half a million bitcoin transactions sent daily in mid December 2017. On the plus side, the less crowded market has finally been able to bring the fee costs down.

Do you think bitcoin exchanges will see an increase in web traffic during March? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!

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