Global P2P trading volume plunges as crypto market slumps

While many centralized exchanges have benefited greatly from the recent sell-off, P2P trading volume, represented by Paxful, has fallen by nearly 50% this week. Latin America is the only region where P2P trading volume has bucked the trend in the sluggish market.

The recent sluggish performance of the crypto market has driven a massive increase in trading volume on centralized exchanges, but there has been a real and significant drop in activity on peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platforms.

Latin America was the only region to buck the trend .

The United States, the region with the largest P2P trading volume, saw its P2P trading volume fall 42% this week - from $23.4 million to nearly $13.6 million.

Sub-Saharan Africa, which has been the second-largest region for P2P trading after North America for much of 2020, saw a 32% drop in local P2P trading volume, from approximately $12.9 million to $8.7 million — driven in part by a 38% drop in trading activity in Nigeria.

P2P trading volumes in the Asia-Pacific region also fell by 25% this week.

Latin America was the only region to see a significant increase in P2P trading volume over the past week, rising 11% to $13.2 million.

This week, 43% of Latin America’s P2P transactions took place in Venezuela, which accounted for two-thirds of the region’s transaction volume growth. Colombia, Peru and Chile also saw a 10% to 20% increase in transaction volume, while Mexico and Brazil saw a significant decline in transaction volume.

Curiously, almost all of the volume decline came from top P2P platform Paxful, with every region on Localbitcoins (except Sub-Saharan Africa which saw a 2% pullback) actually seeing a weekly increase in volume.

In the past week, about $42 million worth of bitcoin changed hands on Localbitcoins, while Paxful hosted less than $20 million in volume — down from about $38 million last week.

By comparison, top spot exchange Coinbase hosted around $1.7 billion in trades over the past seven days, while Bitstamp’s weekly volume was $1.1 billion.

Source: Cointelegraph