Over the past three months, although the fundamentals of Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies may not have changed by a huge amount, we have witnessed a significant change in market sentiment, as the result of which the price of Bitcoin has gone from $3,924 (on February 19) to $7,773 (as of 15:15 UTC on May 20), for a gain of over 98%, as can be seen in the 3-month BTC price chart below:

In fact, on May 14, the Bitcoin price went over $8,000 for the first time in 2019:

This article looks at CryptoCompare‘s “April 2019 Exchange Review” (which was released earlier today), and highlights four general trends that can be observed during the past three months:

Significant increases in the monthly trading volumes at both crypto-to-crypto and fiat-to-crypto spot changes.

Crypto-to-crypto spot exchange continuing to dominate fiat-to-crypto spot exchanges with respect to monthly trading volumes; in particular, among those exchanges that have a trans-fee mining (TFM) business model, FCoin, recorded a 3X increase in its trading volume from March to April.

USD continuing to increase it’s share of the total trading from Bitcoin into fiat.

Tether (USDT) continuing to maintain its dominance over the other stablecoins when it comes to Bitcoin-to-stablecoin trading.

Spot Exchange Trading Volumes

Monthly trading volume from crypto-to-crypto exchanges (i.e. that offer only crypto pairs) went up by 49% (from $267 billion to $396 billion) in April (compared to March), while that from fiat-to-crypto exchanges (i.e. those that offer fiat pairs) increased by 25% (from $58 billion to $72 billion):

The top 15 crypto-to-crypto exchanges all had increases in their monthly trading volumes in April with an average increase of 57%. FCoin, in contrast to previous months, was the largest exchange by monthly volume at $37.1 billion USD (up 300%), followed by OKEx at $35.1 billion (up 12.4%), and ZB at 35.1 $32.4 billion (up 18.8%):

Bithumb was the top exchange by total volume in April at $17 billion, despite experiencing a 47% drop in volume. This was followed by Upbit at $8.7 billion USD (up 20%) and Bitfinex at $6.7 billion USD (up 114%):

Bitcoin (BTC) to Fiat Trading Volumes

In April:

USD, JPY, EUR and KRW made up 95% of total trading from Bitcoin into fiat (i.e. only 5% went from Bitcoin to other fiat currencies), with a 60% share for USD (up from 46% in March) and a 10% share for JPY (down from 24% in March):

BTC to USD volume increased by 74.7% to 1.6 million BTC (from 0.92 million BTC in March); BTC to JPY volume decreased by 40% to 0.29 million BTC (from 0.48 million BTC in March); and BTC to KRW volume increased by 17.6% to 0.25 million (from 0.21 million BTC in March):

Bitcoin to Stablecoin Volumes

In April:

BTC trading into Tether (USDT) represented 78.9% of the total monthly Bitcoin trading into fiat or stablecoins, totalling 10.3 million BTC (an increase of 15% compared to March); BTC-to-USDT’s share went down from 81.7% in March to 78.9% in April:

Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pexels.com. All charts courtesy of CryptoCompare Research.