Binance Market Share Allegedly Hits 77%; Criticism Grows

It is no secret that Binance benefits from FTX’s insolvency. After the second largest exchange in the world went belly up, other exchanges had to divide FTX’s market share among themselves.

And that Binance is one of the biggest winners now seems to be confirmed by recent data. The Block claims that Binance now has a 75% market share on the spot market, 8.5 times more than the second Coinbase.

?Binance now represents 75% of all exchange volume, and almost 8.5x that of the second (Coinbase)

Good or bad for the ecosystem? pic.twitter.com/ykPisGn3W2

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) November 30, 2022

Other Data Providers Do Not Agree

The chart is based on CryptoCompare data and shows that total volume for the month was $642.7 billion. Binance’s share of the yet-to-be-completed month of November reportedly equates to $481.7 billion.

However, there are discrepancies with other data providers. Their data doesn’t find a massive dominance by Binance.

Coinmarketcap, which was acquired by Binance in April 2020, shows that the exchange currently has $12.5 billion in daily trading volume. It is followed by Coinbase Exchange with $1.5 billion dollars, Kraken with $626 million and KuCoin with $495 million.

With a total volume of $44.985 billion over the past 24 hours, this only calculates to a much healthier 27.8% market share for Binance.

CoinGecko, on the other hand, tracks 544 crypto exchanges with a total 24-hour trading volume of $59.5 billion. Binance’s market share is actually only 21.7% based on this figure. However, both data providers only provide daily volumes and thus not a complete picture.

Binance Is In The Crosshair Due To Other Reasons

Regardless of the discussion about Binance’s market supremacy, the exchange is in the crosshair of critics due to other reasons. One of the harshest critics is Bitcoin analyst Dylan LeClair.

As he notes, BNB has made 9x in two months during the bull run with barely a retrace, 10x versus BTC since 2021. “Must be a new paradigm,” LeClair wrote and shared the following chart.

The analyst drew comparisons to FTX and commented ironically; “I’m sure it was retail that sent BNB 10x in two months. Same with FTT, right?”, and shared a chart of FTT and BNB with a similar price trend.

“It definitely wasn’t the exchange operator with an incentive to drive up the price of their own token to create a feedback loop of attention, hype, and more users…. Definitely not,” LeClair further commented.

He argues that the outperformance against “everything” is significant, and one should wonder what the reason is.

Who is supporting this market (we know), and do they have infinite money? […] Think of some alts that outperformed this bull run? SOL (Alameda leverage and fraud), AVAX (3AC), LUNA (perpetual motion machine), etc.

To support his conjecture, LeClair also looked at the volume side profile for BNB/BTC spot market and BNB/USDT perpetual swaps (leverage) on Binance. He found a striking disparity.

While Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said the exchange never uses leverage, users are encouraged to do so by means of various offers on Binance, according to the claim.

Also, CZ reiterated after the FTX collapse that Binance has never used its BNB token as collateral and has never taken on debt. LeClair only commented, “CZ my man, I really hope you’re telling the truth.”

Jack Dorsey And Others Also Express Criticism

Remarkably, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey took a stand on the matter, commenting: “All made up.” Dorsey is known as a Bitcoin proponent, but his statement is vague.

His only other comment on the subject was a response to “Bitcoin, not shitcoin” with “yes,” leaving the community in the dark as to whether he supports LeClair’s theses.

All made up

— jack (@jack) November 29, 2022

Renowned on-chain analyst Willy Woo also expressed cautious criticism of Binance, specifically on its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU):

SAFU is misleading marketing. It was boosted to “$1 billion,” but if you look at it closely and factor out the correlated impact of BNB and to a lesser extent BTC, the fund is really only good for 0.5% of the $68 billion in assets on Binance. This is not hate, it is informing the public.

At press time, BNB was down 0.9%, while BTC experienced a small surge and posted a daily gain of 2.5%.