This Is How Many Trades Crypto Exchanges Process Each Month
A few days ago, I woke up with a question.
How many trades do crypto exchanges process every month?
While everyone can easily go to CoinMarketCap and find the trading volume for an exchange over the last 24 hours, I couldn’t think of any convenient way to calculate the number of trades an exchange is processing.
Now, knowing the exact number of trades an exchange is executing on a daily basis was not a particularly pressing concern, but I couldn’t shake the need to know. I spent some time with my good friend Google, but didn’t get far.
The closest thing I could find was an Investopedia page that claimed Binance could process up to 1.4 million trades a second. While interesting, all it did was raise another question that was related to my mission of understanding an exchange’s trade count.
Does it matter if Binance can process 1.4 million trades a second?
This spun me down into a rabbit hole of more questions and fewer answers. So, there was no choice but to open up our bag of data to find out!
Our team put together a new endpoint for our developer APIs which calculates the number of trades executed by an exchange over a specific time period. This gave me access to everything I needed to determine the number of trades executed by exchanges each month.
The Code
The following examples will show how it’s possible to use this endpoint to collect data. All you need to do is specify the exchange, trading pair, start time, and end time. With this information, Shrimpy will spur into action to calculate the number of trades which were executed during the time frame.
Note: You can access this endpoint for free, so try it out. If you want a higher rate limit for the number of times you can call the endpoint per minute, sign up for the Shrimpy Developer APIs and get a Master API Key. It’s free, so why not try it out!
I used our Python Library to access this endpoint and iterate over every trading pair available on each exchange. The total trade count was collected for each time period and trading pair.
Hot tip: If you don’t know the total list of trading pairs on every major exchange, that’s not a problem. Use the free “Get Trading Pairs” endpoint in the Shrimpy Developer APIs to get the trading pairs on each exchange.
Example Binance
https://dev-api.shrimpy.io/v1/historical/count?type=trade&exchange=binance"eTradingSymbol=USDT&baseTradingSymbol=BTC&startTime=2019-10-01T00:00:00.000Z&endTime=2019-11-01T00:00:00.000ZResponse
{
"count": 13228819
}Example Bittrex
https://dev-api.shrimpy.io/v1/historical/count?type=trade&exchange=bittrex"eTradingSymbol=USDT&baseTradingSymbol=BTC&startTime=2019-10-01T00:00:00.000Z&endTime=2019-11-01T00:00:00.000ZResponse
{
"count": 76928
}In this one example, Binance executed 172x more trades on their BTC/USDT pair than Bittrex over the course of a full month.
But that doesn’t answer the questions. How many trades are exchanges processing each month and does it matter if Binance can process 1.4m trades a second? To answer these questions, we need to aggregate the trade count across every trading pair on a monthly interval.
A Quick Analysis
To better address these questions, we aggregated the number of trades across every trading pair throughout each month and put these values into a spreadsheet. We then repeated this process for other popular exchanges to see if there are any exchanges which are processing enough trades to warrant such high trading throughput.
Starting in November 2018, we calculated a full year of trade count data.
The results portray a few interesting things that answer our first question. How many trades do exchanges process every month?
First, Binance does not execute the most trades each month. This honor goes to Huobi Global with a whopping 121 million trades in October. (Not to be confused with Huobi, which processed a shocking 54 thousand trades in the entire month of October)
Second, the highest number of trades ever executed by Binance in a single month is 125 million trades.
Third, all the exchanges we analyzed combined executed 452 million trades in the month of October.
Fourth, the trade count across exchanges varies drastically. The average trade count was 28 million for the month of October. The median trade count was 6 million.
Conclusions
After all this work, let’s answer our second question. Does it matter that Binance can execute 1.4m trades every second? No. (ok, it kind of matters)
Binance has never averaged to processing more than 50 trades per second over the course of an entire month. This suggests they don’t currently need to process 1.4 million trades per second and they may never need to process that many trades every second.
Combining all the trades executed across every exchange we analyzed doesn’t produce any number much more exciting. Combined, all exchanges only processed 175 trades per second.
Now, the reason we say it “kind of” matters for Binance to be able to process a high number of trades every second is because some traders require fast order execution. Also, this number only depicts the average across a full month. That means there may be some seconds where Binance processes 10,000 trades and some where it processes 0. So, there is a benefit to having the ability to execute 1.4 million trades every second, even if Binance will never actually process that many trades in such a short amount of time.
At the end of the day, we all know faster is better.
Additional Reading
Cryptocurrency Index Funds - Personal Asset Management
Coinbase Pro Review - Are the Fees Too High?
About Shrimpy
Shrimpy leads the market as the premier portfolio management application. Users are able to configure a custom crypto portfolio and implement a passive rebalancing strategy, removing the hassle of having to actively trade crypto.
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Shrimpy’s Developer Trading API is a unified way to integrating trading functionality across every major exchange. Collect historical market data, access real-time websockets, execute advanced trading strategies, and manage an unlimited number of users.
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The Shrimpy Team