Binance Booted From Top Exchange Spot During January Lull

As total cryptocurrency trading volumes declined during January, Binance, Huobi and Bitfinex have now suffered significant month-on-month declines in volume over the last three months, according to CryptoCompare’s latest monthly Exchange Review. Indeed, following a 15% drop off in crypto trading via its platform, Binance has now been displaced as the top volume exchange according to the data aggregation site.Taking Binance's place at the top of CrytpoCompare's volume charts is, ZB.com, the somewhat controversial China-based exchange (with an eye to following its main competitor Binance to Malta), which experienced a 6.2% increase in business, bucking the general trend of the quieter January crypto scene. ZB managed a total volume of $19.6 billion, according to CryptoCompare’s numbers, at an average daily volume of $633 million. Binance totalled $17.5 billion for the month, with OKEX around a billion behind it.

Among the major exchanges, Huobi Pro's monthly volume slipped below the $10 billion mark for the first time since CryptoCompare began compiling the report, dropping from almost $12 billion in December to around $5.6 billion. Bitfinex, however, appears to have fared the worse in recent months, having seen close to $12 billion in volume during November, it fell to under nine in December, and lost almost half of that during January, leaving it outside of the Top 10.

In Autumn of last year, Blockchain-watchers began to call into question the volumes on ZB.com, with a CER report on the exchange's "magic volume" alleging its teams “found definite patterns of unnatural and obviously artificial trade volume performance on 10 out of the top-20 most-traded exchange’s pairs.” Even during January, one particular day of trading in QTUM - where the volume spiked to USDT 120 million - raised eyebrows. You can see the spike clearly on the CryptoCompare chart.

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