A few days ago, I woke up with a question.

How many trades do crypto exchanges process every month?

While everyone can easily go to CoinMarketCap and find the trading volume for an exchange over the last 24 hours, I couldn’t think of any convenient way to calculate the number of trades an exchange is processing.

Now, knowing the exact number of trades an exchange is executing on a daily basis was not a particularly pressing concern, but I couldn’t shake the need to know. I spent some time with my good friend Google, but didn’t get far.

The closest thing I could find was an Investopedia page that claimed Binance could process up to 1.4 million trades a second. While interesting, all it did was raise another question that was related to my mission of understanding an exchange’s trade count.

Does it matter if Binance can process 1.4 million trades a second?

This spun me down into a rabbit hole of more questions and fewer answers. So, there was no choice but to open up our bag of data to find out!

Our team put together a new endpoint for our developer APIs which calculates the number of trades executed by an exchange over a specific time period. This gave me access to everything I needed to determine the number of trades executed by exchanges each month.

The Code

The following examples will show how it’s possible to use this endpoint to collect data. All you need to do is specify the exchange, trading pair, start time, and end time. With this information, Shrimpy will spur into action to calculate the number of trades which were executed during the time frame.

Note: You can access this endpoint for free, so try it out. If you want a higher rate limit for the number of times you can call the endpoint per minute, sign up for the Shrimpy Developer APIs and get a Master API Key. It’s free, so why not try it out!

I used our Python Library to access this endpoint and iterate over every trading pair available on each exchange. The total trade count was collected for each time period and trading pair.

Hot tip: If you don’t know the total list of trading pairs on every major exchange, that’s not a problem. Use the free “Get Trading Pairs” endpoint in the Shrimpy Developer APIs to get the trading pairs on each exchange.

Example Binance

https://dev-api.shrimpy.io/v1/historical/count?type=trade&exchange=binance"eTradingSymbol=USDT&baseTradingSymbol=BTC&startTime=2019-10-01T00:00:00.000Z&endTime=2019-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

Response

{ "count": 13228819 }

Example Bittrex

https://dev-api.shrimpy.io/v1/historical/count?type=trade&exchange=bittrex"eTradingSymbol=USDT&baseTradingSymbol=BTC&startTime=2019-10-01T00:00:00.000Z&endTime=2019-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

Response

{ "count": 76928 }

In this one example, Binance executed 172x more trades on their BTC/USDT pair than Bittrex over the course of a full month.

But that doesn’t answer the questions. How many trades are exchanges processing each month and does it matter if Binance can process 1.4m trades a second? To answer these questions, we need to aggregate the trade count across every trading pair on a monthly interval.

A Quick Analysis

To better address these questions, we aggregated the number of trades across every trading pair throughout each month and put these values into a spreadsheet. We then repeated this process for other popular exchanges to see if there are any exchanges which are processing enough trades to warrant such high trading throughput.

Starting in November 2018, we calculated a full year of trade count data.