Bittrex was previously one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world in terms of daily trading volume.
Bittrex was one of the leading crypto exchanges in the world during the Bull Run of 2017. At the time, an increasing number of people were entering the market as Bitcoin’s price surged by nearly 20x, rallying from $1,000 to $19,000 by the end of 2017.
However, Bittrex has lost its place amongst the top crypto exchanges by trading volume. Bittrex currently occupies the 24th place in terms of the leading exchanges by trading volume.
The Chief Business Officer (CBO) of the exchange, Chris Sinkey, explained during a recent interview how the cryptocurrency trading platform fell behind. He said;
“Shortly after I joined Bittrex, it was the largest exchange in the world by trading volume and number of markets. And there was so much demand for accounts at that time as Bitcoin’s price ran up from two to three thousand, then up to $17K, $18K, and $19,000. One of our servers that supported new account signups was having trouble handling the load. We had to throttle our new users. It’s actually one of the reasons why Binance was able to grow. Because the users that couldn’t get into Bittrex had to go somewhere. Binance was the new exchange at that time. They had just done their ICO the summer before and they were really starting to grow in popularity.”
Sinkey added that the reason other exchanges now control a lion’s share of the market is the amount of capital they’ve raised and plowed into marketing. He added that Bittrex made the decision to remain entirely private and self-funded.
The Bittrex CBO was also asked to differentiate between Bittrex and Bittrex Global. He said;
“Other exchanges, like Binance, do the reverse of that. They came into the US using the same infrastructure, but they created a US exchange. The difference is that our order books are shared with Bittrex US. […] So in a Bitcoin order book, because both markets are available for trade, a U.S. customer can be the counterparty to trade with a European customer. That’s because all customers on our platform are KYC’d and we follow very stringent and compliant AMPL process.”