What's going on: The run on crypto is far from over, it seems that it has only just begun: cointelegraph.com reports that the most popular exchanges are adding around 100,000 users – per day!
Back in November Coinbase, the largest ans easiest to use exchange in the US, said that they added about 100,000 accounts around Thanksgiving holiday. Now Changpeng Zhao, who is the founder and CEO of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange globally with an enormous $9.5 bln daily trading volume, announced that they currently add more than 250,000 users on a single day.
The demand for new accounts has been so high, that Binance stated last week, that “due to the overwhelming surge in popularity, Binance will have to temporarily disable new user registrations to allow for an infrastructure upgrade.” South Korean exchange Bithumb, which is the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume, also stopped accepting new users.
Why should I care: These developments show two things: more and more people want to invest in crypto and the most popular exchanges are struggling to adapt to huge demand.
Exchanges like Binance, Kraken or Coinbase hired a lot of new employees in 2017 and are now valued as multi-billion US-dollar companies. Strict Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) systems the companies were forced to implement by the authorities in 2017 and the fact that user applications must be manually approved and verified, make the process painstakingly time consuming.
One can only guess how many people want in right now. The number is for sure higher than the 100,000+ accounts, that are roughly added every day.
It will be interesting to see how exchanges adapt in the coming weeks and months, what kind of new legislation is on the way to either make it easier or harder for them and how decentralized approaches like kyber.network or the 0x protocol will impact the space.
Source: cointelegraph.com, cointelegraph.com
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