- Wintermute has released its OTC trading report for 2023.
- The crypto market maker saw a 400% jump in OTC trade volume.
- The performance came as exchanges struggled with liquidity issues.
Global crypto market maker and liquidity provider Wintermute has reported a significant surge in its weekly OTC trading volume over the past year, even as exchanges witnessed rapid declines at the height of crypto winter.
On January 9, the company published its “Wintermute OTC: 2023 in Review” report, highlighting its over-the-counter volume, which increased 400% throughout last year as volumes moved off-exchanges.
Wintermute Records $2B Weekly Trade Volume
According to the report, despite the overall slower and sometimes stagnant markets, “the past year of 2023 at Wintermute OTC desk was marked with significant growth” as the company witnessed a 4x increase in total OTC trading volume from H1 to H2 2023.
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While its OTC trading volume decreased as the number of individual trades remained stable in the first half of the year, the number of unique traders surged sixfold to 29 million in H2. The weekly OTC trading volume peaked at $2 billion during this period.
“The developments in the space at the end of 2022 left the whole industry facing a challenging outlook. Markets slowed down, liquidity dried up, and we observed volumes starting to shift from exchanges to OTC,” Wintermute CEO and Co-founder Evgeny Gaevo stated.
The “dried up” liquidity situation referred to by Gaevo stems from the “Alameda gap” caused by the ripple effect Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange had on the industry when it collapsed in November 2022.
Before FTX’s implosion, Alameda was the industry’s top market maker, providing billions in liquidity in Bitcoin, Ether, and alternative cryptocurrencies.
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The effects of Alameda’s exit on the industry’s liquidity could still be felt as recently as last November when the liquidity available on Binance’s order book dropped by 25%, following the exchange’s historic $4 billion settlement with the U.S. DOJ.
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