2025 Crypto Exchange Showdown: Booming or Busting?
Crypto exchanges face their make-or-break moment as regulatory claws sink deeper and traders demand lightning-fast execution. Who's thriving—and who's barely surviving?
The Bull Case: Liquidity Tsunami
Trading volumes smash records as institutional money floods in. Decentralized exchanges quietly eat 30% of market share—no KYC, no mercy.
The Bear Trap: Regulation Roulette
FSA crackdowns leave three major platforms scrambling. 'Compliance costs doubled this year,' whispers one CFO while polishing their golden parachute.
Final Take: Exchanges either adapt or die. Just like your portfolio during last week's 20% flash crash.
How Did Exchanges Fare in H1?
The result of the analysis revealed that Binance and Coinbase are currently leading the exchange landscape across different verticals. Binance emerged as the most dominant and multifaceted crypto exchange. The platform leads in spot volume, stablecoin reserves, futures, trading, capital inflows, and user activity across multiple networks.
Coinbase led as a strong institutional platform, particularly in ethereum network usage and reserve size. However, the firm’s overall trading activity and market coverage stayed relatively conservative. As mid-tier exchanges, the reserve sizes, inflow dominance, and altcoin user activity of Bybit, OKX, and Bitget stayed below the top-tier platforms. The trio competed in derivatives and Ethereum stablecoin flows, as well as regional user activity.
On-chain activity indicated that users preferred Binance, as the exchange led in both altcoin deposit and withdrawal transactions. The exchange also saw high asset rotation during market rallies. Additionally, Binance recorded the highest number of USDT transactions on the TRON network.
Binance Dominates Spot and Futures Markets
As the leading spot exchange, Binance accounted for a 42% share (roughly $2 trillion) of the total centralized spot trading volume. CryptoQuant said the platform led in both Bitcoin and altcoin trading. Crypto.com and Bybit followed suit with respective volumes of $800 billion and $450 billion, evenly distributed between Bitcoin and altcoins.
Furthermore, Binance led the Bitcoin futures market by a wide margin, accounting for $4.1 trillion in perpetual futures volume. This represents 38% of the global market share. Bitget, Bybit, and OKX followed with 19.3% ($2.1 trillion), 16.8% ($1.82 trillion), and 16.7% ($1.81 trillion). Other exchanges accounted for less than 10%.
Once again, Binance led in stablecoin reserves among the top 10 centralized exchanges, with 59.65% market share ($31.67 billion). OKX and Coinbase came next, with 15% and 11%, respectively, while the rest held reserve shares below 6%.
On a broader scale, Coinbase held the highest crypto reserves, $123 billion (31.2%) in bitcoin, ether, TetherUSD, and USD Coin. Combined with Binance, both entities held about 60% of all reserves. Only Bitfinex held up to 12.3% – other exchanges accounted for less than 6% each.
Finally, Coinbase emerged as the exchange with the highest on-chain activity, with more than 17 million transactions. Binance followed with approximately 13 million transactions.
