On Tuesday, we changed how we count total asset volume and liquidity. We used to count a market’s volume and liquidity towards only its base asset’s total volume. For example, a BTC/USDT market’s volume would only count towards BTC’s 24 hour volume. As of Tuesday, we count volume and liquidity towards both the base and quote asset of that pair. After all, selling BTC for USDT is essentially the same thing as buying USDT.
As a result, Tether has taken the #1 position in our ranking when sorting by volume. This is pretty interesting, because Bitcoin is usually at the top of any crypto ranking list, be it CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, or Messari. However, as Decrypt pointed out earlier this year, Tether is truly a giant of crypto when you consider trading volume. More Tether changes hands every day than BTC, when considering USD notional value of each transaction.
We still continue to offer sorting by Market Cap (although it’s a very flawed way of measuring value), and of course we recognize that BTC will always be the true OG of this ecosystem. Despite that, the data is telling an interesting story and we’re just sitting back and listening.
