How are leading cryptocurrency exchanges faring in the current market?





To get an idea, LongHash looked at websites belonging to a selection of ten prominent fiat and non-fiat crypto exchanges. Then, we examined their monthly traffic from October to December in 2018, using data sourced from SimilarWeb.

Coinbase remains a powerhouse; itBit had the largest drop

Fiat cryptocurrency exchanges are those that allow their users to purchase digital assets with fiat currencies such as the dollar or euro. In this category, we looked at websites belonging to the following exchanges: Bitfinex, Coinbase, Simex, Bitstamp, P2PB2B, Kraken, Cryptonex,

Bitlish, Gemini, and itBit.





Coinbase had the most total visits between October and December last year, according to SimilarWeb. In this three month period, Coinbase.com purportedly had over 74.33 million visits. Better still, this number remained relatively stable, with 23.86 million visits in October, 25.04 million in November, and 25.42 million in December.





It is worth noting that SimilarWeb counts a visit the moment a user accesses a site. From there, any additional activity is still included as one visit. The exception is when a user is inactive for more than half an hour and becomes active again — at which point an additional visit would be added to the total.





Among the fiat exchanges we analyzed, Coinbase.com proved a clear winner in terms of web traffic. The runner-up, Bitfinex.com had far less total visits over the three-month period. It had 17.78 million total visits between October and December. It too stayed quite stable, hovering around 6 million visitors each month.





When looking at percentages, the fiat exchange with the largest dip in monthly visitors was itBit.com. It went from 173,935 monthly visits in October to 70,648 visits in December, marking a drop of over 59%.





In contrast, the fiat exchange with the largest rise in web visitors was P2PB2B.io. It had an over 144% increase in total visitors between October and December.

Non-fiat exchanges: Binance dropped 19%, BitMax increased 204%

Non-fiat cryptocurrency exchanges, on the other hand, are ones where users must use one digital asset to purchase another. We looked at websites belonging to the following ten exchanges in this category: Okex, Huobi, Binance, DigiFinex, CoinBene, ZBG, EXX, BitForex, Fcoin, and BitMax.





Among them, Binance appears to be the most popular non-fiat exchange. It is worth mentioning that Binance is aiming to also operate as a fiat exchange. According to reports, users can purchase crypto on the platform with their credit cards in select locations, as of January 31, 2019.





In terms of web traffic, Binance.com’s total visitors between October and December 2018 surpassed any other crypto exchange site by far — even ones operated by fiat exchanges like Coinbase. The site’s total number of visitors in this three month period was over 95.4 million. Still, it had the largest percentage drop (-19%), going from 35 million in October to 28.33 million monthly visitors in December.





BitMax.io had the largest traffic increase (+204%) out of the sites we analyzed. SimilarWeb’s analytics tool said the platform had 83,696 total visitors for the month of October and 255,057 in December.





Ultimately, web traffic is not a definitive way to measure an exchange’s popularity. These statistics are not necessarily indicative of the number of users trading on these platforms. Still, web traffic does provide some insight into leading exchanges that may not be offered through more common metrics like exchange volume.