The big crypto news last week was that for the 3rd time this year China has declared a ban against the cryptocurrency industry. This most recent declaration directly targeted foreign exchanges, and explicitly stated that Chinese citizens are not allowed to be served even by cryptocurrency exchanges operating outside of China.
The crypto market did in fact take a hit after the China crypto ban on Friday, with Bitcoin (BTC) closing down 4.56% on the day. However, the weekend showed the global crypto market that Chinese crypto traders aren’t going away just yet.
Decentralized Exchanges (DEX) such as Uniswap (UNI) and dYdX (DYDX) saw a surge in trade volume as Chinese investors began moving their trading to anonymous DEX’s that are far more difficult than centralized exchanges (like Coinbase) for auditors and governmental organizations to track.
In fact, for the first time ever dYdX processed nearly 15% more 24-hour trading volume than Coinbase did yesterday.
The increase in trade volume on decentralized exchanges pushed DEX tokens to be the strongest performing group in the cryptocurrency space today. dYdX is the hottest trending DEX, while Uniswap is the largest DEX as it processes over 27% of decentralized market share.
Both beat BTC today, and somewhat significantly if I might add.
As the cryptocurrency industry continues to develop, the tenet of personal privacy will be crucial. If traders are being forced to use DEX’s to invest in cryptocurrencies because of the regulatory consequences of their home country, then so be it. Clearly, it’s worth the risk, otherwise, nobody would be using decentralized exchanges at all.
DEX’s aim to allow anyone to trade securely and privately with any assets that they want and without the restrictive oversight of a large company, institution, or government. For that reason, we are keeping an eye on decentralized exchange coins to keep up their positive performance.
Coins to Watch: DEX tokens: Uniswap (UNI), SushiSwap (SUSHI), PancakeSwap (CAKE)
Today’s Winners: Filecoin (FIL) +6.8%, Coinbase rolls out direct deposit service for converting paychecks to Bitcoin
Today’s Losers: Tezos (XTZ) -11.7% after being a market leader last week