Daily trading volume on South Korea's biggest cryptocurrency exchange has tumbled 75% from this year's high in a possible sign that frenzied trading in altcoins has fizzled. The question is this drastic drop in volume a single that digital assets other than market leaders bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) may struggle to maintain lofty valuations.
Upbit, which lists 192 cryptocurrencies and offers trading in 309 pairs, registered just $3.79 billion of volume in the past 24 hours. That's down from as high as $15 billion on March 5, when TradingView data shows the total market cap of altcoins surged to a two-year high of $788 billion. Market cap has since steadied at about $750 billion.
South Korean crypto traders have historically appear to focus more on altcoins than BTC and ETH. A study by DeSpread Research in October said Upbit's investors are primarily interested in maximizing profits through altcoins and tend to accept the high risks associated with these coins.
The overall, market was also struggling today which could be further evidence that we could be seeing some rockier trading ahead. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView tracked a problematic start to Q2, with BTC price losses passing 4.5%. I'm not making any significant moves as there will be quite a bit of chop in this range until we finally get to pick a direction.
I'm not sure if any of this is linked, but Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum co-founder, was spotted out and about in the South Korean tech hub city of Pangyo over the weekend. The Ethereum co-founder delivered a keynote speech at ETH Seoul 2024. The gaming giant Neowiz hosted the event at its Pangyo headquarters on March 30 and it looks like he has extended his stay in the city.
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People are fickle. It’s all the FOMO trading that happened. The bull run is still months away.
I've heard that April can be a bad month for all of this. It's not too surprising that alts are starting to cool down.
I guess anything can happen. Isn't Upbit a hard platform to get into? I think it was one of the exchanges with Hive/HBD but unless you were a Korean, I don't think you could trade there.
This is terrible bad. Hoping it will not affect the crypto exchange
Things are just warming up, and the newbies tend to sell on the first breathe of instability.
Is Upbit available in the US? Almost nothing is anymore....
This is not good news and we may see the price go down