On October 20, 2020, the quantity of Bitcoin (BTC) held for major exchanges fell below 2.5 million BTC for the first time of 2 years.

Nexo co founder Antoni Trenchev opined to Cointelegraph that this trend is driven by the world finally acknowledging that merely Bitcoin provides good monetary policy:

“[People are] gradually are discovering what several of us have widely known for some time – BTC is actually the one sound monetary policy right now and you can’t find the money to depart from the best performing asset of the decade.”
In addition, he noted that the community is resorting more to self custody fixes, which includes platforms as Nexo, where they’re able to “tax efficiently borrow against the assets of theirs as opposed to marketing them.” Cointelegraph mentioned yesterday that the Bitcoin supplies is now diffused greater than ever.

Alex Mashinsky, co founder of the Celsius crypto lending platform, told Cointelegraph that the exodus will likely continue unless exchanges begin to offer better terms to their customers:

“As long as interchanges decline to offer the clientele of theirs more they are going to leave them and show up to Celsius. We merely crossed $2.7B in deposits since launch two years back. We would not be developing really fast unless of course we did significantly more to the clients of ours than exchanges.”

From the chart earlier, we can see that this swing hasn’t affected all exchanges at the same time. While balances at BitMEX and Bitfinex had been decimated, reducing by more than half, Binance has went on to gather additional money. Coinbase’s coffers have stayed generally unchanged as well.

The growth of DeFi might have in addition contributed to this phenomena. The volume of Bitcoin locked on Ethereum through wBTC and renBTC presently exceeds 130,000. Merely a few months before, the amounts had been negligible. Yet another likely primary cause is institutional adoption. Apart from the steady progress of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust Fund, publicly traded organizations like MicroStrategy and Square began incorporating crypto assets to the treasuries of theirs.

It seems that there is possibly a general trend towards drivers withdrawing Bitcoin from custodial interchanges, or perhaps a few significant exchanges are simply losing the confidence of the customers of theirs. The latter may be a decent conclusion, as a simple 3 platforms (BitMEX, Huobi, and Bitfinex) were responsible for the bulk of the trend – their balances decreased by 390,000 BTC, which makes them accountable for almost 80 % of the complete decline.