Tether dominates centralized exchange stablecoin trade volumes despite market cap decline

Stablecoins haven’t been exempt from suffering losses during the ongoing cryptocurrency market crash, but its major assets are still persevering, with Tether (USDT) not only ranking third among all cryptos but also dominating centralized exchanges by stablecoin trading volume.

As it happens, Tether’s share of trading volumes in centralized exchange (CEX) markets remains the highest among all stablecoins, according to the most recent data published by crypto analytics platform CoinMetrics on October 18.

Stablecoin trading volumes

Specifically, USDT currently takes up around 70% of all trading volume reported by exchanges, despite this share being smaller than at the year’s turn. Binance USD (BUSD) occupies second place and is seeing an increase in spot volume share thanks to being used more frequently as a quote asset on Binance.

USDT and BUSD are followed by USD Coin (USDC) and Dai (DAI), with the former receiving relatively little utilization, particularly following Binance’s plan to deprecate USDC-quoted spot pairs on the crypto exchange and convert all stablecoins into BUSD.

Market cap dominance

Binance’s actions can also be attributed to USDC’s market cap dominance on Ethereum (ETH) falling to 39% in October, after peaking in early July when it accounted for 44% of the market, according to data published by Messari.

At the same time, this major decision has failed to achieve more than a 5% increase in the market share on the Ethereum network for BUSD, as the crypto market intelligence platform stressed.

Across blockchains, Tether has retained its position as the largest stablecoin by market cap. However, it has “suffered heavily since summer and has yet to recover,” Messari highlighted in a tweet on October 16. By this indicator, it is followed by USDC, BUSD, and DAI, respectively.

Finally, it is worth noting that the total market cap of stablecoins has declined in 2022, in line with the entire cryptocurrency market sentiment, although currently it amounts to at least $135 billion, according to the CoinMetrics report.

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