According to recent statistics, only about 7% of the circulating supply of Ethereum (ETH) is currently being held on cryptocurrency exchanges. This represents a notable decrease over the past few years. Data also reveals how storage was redistributed among the various exchanges over the same period.
Popular cryptocurrency monitoring resource TokenAnalyst has presented exciting information from the last four years. Within this period, the whole cryptocurrency community experienced dramatic changes.
The statistics focus on the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum, and its storage and usage among the most popular exchanges.
Starting with less than five million ETH stored on exchanges, data reveals that this number skyrocketed to 20 million in the summer of 2016. Ever since then, however, it has been reducing steadily, and it’s currently below 7 million. This represents less than 7% of ETH’s total circulating supply.
Here’s the amount of $ETH held in exchange wallets over time.
Some interesting takeaways:
1) The decline of @Poloniex after the 2017 price spike
2) The emergence of @binance and @bitfinex in 2019
3) 20% of circulating ETH was held in exchange wallets in Jul 2016 vs just 7% now pic.twitter.com/DsJ20BEz23— TokenAnalyst (@thetokenanalyst) November 26, 2019
Keeping cryptocurrency safe is one of the main priorities for any investor. Even though the security of most exchanges has improved significantly over the years, it’s best to avoid them when it comes to long-term storage of large amounts of crypto. As a general rule of thumb, it’s advisable to only keep the amount that you are using to trade on the exchange, while safekeeping the rest in your cold storage.
The data above also shows how tides have shifted when it comes to the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges. For instance, there’s a huge difference between the amounts kept on Poloniex now and three years ago.
On the other hand, Binance and Bitfinex paint the exact opposite picture. While they were used to store a relatively small amount of ETH until the end of 2017, they are now showing serious increases in this regard. Binance and Bitfinex are the most used cryptocurrency exchanges to store Ethereum.