Oh, how far we’ve come. 

To say that retail investors dominated the early days of crypto trading is an understatement. Judging from headlines in major news outlets, Bitcoin typically traded hands when buying or selling illicit goods and services on the dark web. 

But by the middle of the 2010s, it became a genuine retail phenomenon. Fast-forward another decade, and the approval of exchange-traded products and a changing regulatory environment saw the arrival of institutional traders. 

That leaves us with the question: Where is crypto being traded today? Do the pioneers of the crypto economy — so-called centralized exchanges, like Binance — still dominate, or have they been supplanted by traditional financial firms?

Unsurprisingly, crypto trade volumes have been extremely volatile this decade. 

In 2021, spot trade volume topped $22 trillion. In 2023 traders were still licking their wounds from the collapse of FTX in 2022, and trade volume fell to a measly $7.5 trillion. But 2024 saw the approval of spot ETFs and the election of Donald Trump, fueling a recovery. That year, volume topped $17 trillion. It grew further in 2025, topping $20 trillion. 

Among crypto-native venues, centralized exchanges still dominate. They account for 85% of spot volume, while decentralized exchanges, such as Uniswap, account for just 15%. 

But Binance has also held onto its throne amid the arrival of traditional financial firms. Binance regularly handles between $5 billion and $20 billion in daily Bitcoin trading volume. By comparison, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, peaked at roughly $3 billion on Nasdaq and averages well below that level. 

The same holds true for Ethereum. On the New York Stock Exchange, the Grayscale Ethereum ETF represents just a fraction of the activity observed on Binance. It’s a pattern that holds across the leading centralized exchanges more broadly: crypto-native venues remain where the asset class actually trades. More specifically, Binance has captured 39.6% of the global spot market since August 2025, generating $3.54 trillion in trading volume. 

That’s true for derivatives as well. Glassnode data tracking Bitcoin futures open interest since 2021 shows Binance's open interest has frequently matched or exceeded CME's, even though CME has been the primary regulated venue for institutional Bitcoin futures exposure in the United States.

A small group of centralized exchanges dominate in terms of order book depth as well, with Binance in a class of its own. 

Crypto data provider CoinGlass tracks order book depth for perpetual futures. It found that Binance's average ±1% Bitcoin depth in 2025 stood at $536 million. That’s nearly three times OKX’s $202 million and more than five times Bitget's $103 million. 

The pattern holds across assets. The order book depth for Ether averages $204 million on Binance and $147 million on OKX; for Solana, those figures were $56 million and $37 million, respectively.

But it’s too early to crown Binance the preeminent crypto exchange. We still need to see which venues lead in price discovery. To see a more detailed discussion of the points above, read our full report here.

Stablecoins have proven their use case: dollars that move at software speed, settlement that skips outdated banking rails; Mastercard's move to acquire BVNK; Visa's stablecoin expansion across nine blockchains; and progress on the CLARITY Act all point the same direction.

But the version of crypto winning in that world looks less like what the industry once imagined and more like existing financial infrastructure with better plumbing. Alex argues a second, stranger path is building alongside it: private compute, encrypted state, and systems rebuilt from first principles rather than fitted into old ones.

Read the full opinion piece here.

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