On October 20, 2020, the volume of Bitcoin (BTC) held for significant exchanges fell below 2.5 million BTC for the first time of 2 years.

Nexo co-founder Antoni Trenchev opined to Cointelegraph this phenomena is driven by the world finally realizing that only Bitcoin presents sound monetary policy:

“[People are] slowly are realizing what some of us have known for a while – BTC is the only audio monetary policy right this moment and you can’t afford to depart from the best performing advantage of the decade.”
He also observed that the community is actually resorting far more to self-custody solutions, this includes platforms as Nexo, just where they can “tax efficiently borrow against their assets as opposed to marketing them.” Cointelegraph noted yesterday that the Bitcoin resources is now diffused more than ever.

Alex Mashinsky, co-founder of the Celsius crypto lending platform, told Cointelegraph that the exodus will probably continue unless interchanges start offering better terms to their customers:

“As long as exchanges decline to give their clientele much more they will leave them and go to Celsius. We just crossed $2.7B in deposits since launch two years back. We would not be cultivating very fast unless of course we did significantly more to our customers than exchanges.”

By the chart earlier, we can see that this swing has not impacted each switches at the same time. While balances at BitMEX and Bitfinex ended up being decimated, reducing by more than half, Binance has continued to accumulate extra money. Coinbase’s coffers have stayed mostly unchanged as well.

The progress of DeFi may have also contributed to this trend. The quantity of Bitcoin locked on Ethereum via wBTC and renBTC currently exceeds 130,000. Just a couple of months past, these numbers had been negligible. Yet another likely culprit is institutional adoption. Aside from the constant growth of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust Fund, publicly traded businesses like MicroStrategy and Square set about adding crypto assets to the treasuries of theirs.

It seems that there’s either an overall trend towards users withdrawing Bitcoin out of custodial switches, or even maybe a couple of significant interchanges are simply losing the trust of their clients. The latter might be a fair conclusion, as a simple three operating systems (BitMEX, Huobi, and Bitfinex) had been responsible for the bulk of the movement – their balances decreased by 390,000 BTC, allowing them to be accountable for pretty much eighty % of the total decline.