July 2018 Cryptocurrency Industry Analysis

Cryptocurrencies increase in value with more adoption. So we can make a general assumption that the more users of a particular cryptocurrency the more valuable that crypotcurrency should be. This follows something called Metcalfe’s Law.

Metcalfe’s law states the effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

The word value can be seen as utility or usefulness of a product/service. Cryptocurrencies all have volatile prices, but they all have a slowly changing value. Prices can be set by market forces of supply and demand but value is set by the utility of a product/service and the amount of users utilizing such service.

How can we calculate the value of the cryptocurrency industry? The following list seems to be possible quantifiable points:

How much usage is there in cryptocurrency charts?
How much usage is there in cryptocurrency exchanges?
How much usage is there in decentralized apps?

We will get these values with the help of SimilarWeb and several popular cryptocurrency resources, must have a minimum of a million page views a month. We will compare the past six months of performance with the data provided by SimilarWeb.

Cryptocurrency Pricing Charts

The market cap of all the cryptocurrencies have been dropping and the market sentiment is clearly bearish. This bear market started near January 2018 and the data above shows the frequency usage of both websites. The trend is definitely downwards and it doesn’t seem to be increasing any time soon. Coin Market Cap is one of the most famous resources when it comes to knowing the sentiment of the market. It even gets more views than the most popular exchanges.

Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Out of these exchanges Coinbase, BitMEX, and Upbit have had a positive mark on their usage. However, what is really interesting is BitMEX’s usage. From February to July 2018 you can see that it’s usage has doubled. This could be due to the bear market that we are in and BitMEX ability to provide leverage and shorts. The people that were making money before January 2018 were the Hodlers but the people that were making money from this past 6 months are those that shorted Bitcoin. If you notice the average visit duration of the exchanges you can see that people make a couple of trades and then get off the platform they are using. On BitMEX, users are staying on the platform for more than 30 minutes on average. BitMEX users do a lot on the platform maybe even 3x as much or either look at the fluctuations more often than other exchanges.

Coinbase has seen an increase in usage as well but not as much as BitMEX. It is most likely due to the run up that led Bitcoin to as high as $8,000. However, it appears that Bitcoin is back under $6,500. Bitcoin has gained market dominance back over 50%, according to Coin Market Cap.

Blockchain Explorers

Etherscan is a very well known Ethereum blockchain explorer. Since there are several Bitcoin explorers I chose to display Blockchain.info because of it’s change. Blockchain.info lost 75% of it’s traffic from June to July 2018. Even back in February both of these block explorers had the same amount of usage. With these charts we could infer that there are several transactions happening on the Ethereum blockchain while not as many transactions on Bitcoin’s blockchain compared to the month of June 2018.

Decentralized Apps

When it comes to decentralized apps Steemit takes the crown. It has actually increased in usage from June to July 2018. Steemit makes it easy to understand how a decentralized app is possible. Maybe the usage of Steemit has “bottomed” and we will see more Steemit adoption from here on. Other dApps like d.tube keep losing usage in contrast to competitors like centralized Youtube.

Maybe users are caring more about the content that is created on these platforms. Competing against Youtube for content seems like a tough battle but competing against Medium for content seems like an easier battle.

Conclusion

These are the numbers for the cryptocurrency industry but of course there are other values I haven’t included because I either thought their usage count was too low or I though they were too obscure to discover.

Since there is a big increase in usage for BitMEX compared to several other exchanges I can see that the entire industry isn’t collapsing. BitMEX’s usage can be seen more as a cycle for what speculative traders do during bear markets.

If you liked this content, be sure to follow the Metamesh publication and check out what we are building! Metamesh is a product sharing application that makes selling your crypto products much easier and will take your crypto brand to the next level.