Our exchange’s traffic numbers for October just went live on SimilarWeb. As the CEO of XS2 Exchange I thought I’d compare our results to the top 20 exchanges. I grabbed the top 20 exchanges by adjusted volume from CoinMarketCap.

Top 20 exchanges on CoinMarketCap by adjusted volume (14 Nov 2018)

Then I looked up the October estimated visitor numbers for these exchanges in SimilarWeb. I put the results in the table below.

I combined volume and visit numbers

If Binance reported its volume correctly, these numbers would suggest that the number 5 exchange’s users trade more than 128x the volume per visit compared to Binance.

Could it be true that Binance was the worst performing exchange in the top 20 in terms of converting visits into volume as these numbers suggest?

I then looked at a few of the exchanges further down the CoinMarketCap list that I’m personally more familiar with.

Compared to these 5 exchanges, the Binance number of $497 volume/visit, actually looks like a great result.

I’m certainly not saying that any specific exchange is over-reporting its volume, but I do think the total industry volume seems to be highly over-reported.

Anyway, make up your own mind.

Please note that I removed most exchange names because this article is not about any specific exchange. This article is about me questioning the overall reported industry volumes.

For specific exchanges, higher volume or lower recorded visitor numbers could have a wide range of reasons such as mobile app use not being included, the type of customers they attract, coins listed, support for fiat, etc. However the volume numbers in my opinion bear further investigation.

I stumbled upon these interesting volume graphs as I was looking at the CoinMarketCap list:

A little dip

My favourite, not sure how you get this, but it’s beautiful

Cool

This all made me think that there must be better ways to measure the “size” of exchanges. Luckily the industry uses public blockchains. An interesting metric to check would be the size of the exchanges’ wallets which may provide a more accurate measure of exchange “size” and liquidity.

At XS2 our wallet addresses are publicly available as part of our live Proof of Solvency.