Bitcoin ‘far larger’ than Binance or Coinbase, says Jan3 CEO: BTC Prague 2023

Amid the worry about legal actions against major cryptocurrency exchanges, a Bitcoin (BTC) supporter asserted that the BTC market is much larger than the one followed by exchanges.

Samson Mow, CEO of Jan3, informed Cointelegraph at the BTC Prague 2023 conference on June 9 that the Bitcoin market is not restricted to Binance, Coinbase, or any other cryptocurrency exchange.

Mow stated that it is difficult to determine the size of the Bitcoin market since many trades occur as block trades.

Mow referred to private trading channels that enable investors to make large Bitcoin purchases or sales in a confidential manner. He mentioned that some of these channels are P2P or OTC transactions, emphasizing the privacy of such deals.

Private trading channels such as P2P or OTC are not taken into account when calculating the total BTC trading volumes on major crypto sites like CoinGecko. This implies that the actual daily trading volume of Bitcoin is higher than the $9.6 billion reported as of now.

“CoinGecko only monitors trades that occur on cryptocurrency exchanges,” said Bobby Ong, co-founder and COO of CoinGecko, to Cointelegraph. He added that the platform does not track trades that take place on peer-to-peer platforms and brokerages.

The executive mentioned that P2P platforms such as Binance P2P, Huobi P2P, Paxful, Remitano, and so forth exist. However, Ong mentioned that CoinGecko has no plans to monitor these platforms in the foreseeable future.

Binance.US has suspended trading for a multitude of USDT, BTC, and BUSD pairs in response to the SEC lawsuit.

Besides P2P, CoinGecko also does not keep track of institutional trades on OTC, according to Ong, who further stated.

The comments made by the CEO on January 3rd could suggest that crypto exchange giants such as Binance or Coinbase might not have as much control over the Bitcoin market as some people believe.

In January 2023, K33 Research — formerly known as Arcane Research — reported that in the previous year, Binance had a share of 92% of the Bitcoin spot market. The Norwegian crypto research firm wrote that “no matter how you look at it in terms of trading activity, Binance is the crypto market”.

The magazine states that Bitcoin is headed towards meeting the goals of achieving “Net Zero”.

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