Crypto Exchanges 2022: 23 DOA…MIA
We live in curious crypto times.
Cryptowinter is clearly a thing and some are sensing light at the end of the tunnel. Others are unclear that we even have the tunnel width let alone other dimensions such as the length. Then again in certain respects, opacity has traditionally been a sign of the times in crypto land. This is a technological movement which, having originally styled itself on rather starkly libertarian principals, has often avoided too much clear transparency…even as others have worked assiduously (albeit as a minority of the movement it seems) to promote transparency and even regulation.
Now, regulation is tough, often arbitrary and frequently can have curious impacts — bumps in the carpet and more. At the same time, it has always been clear to me that any form of digital assets would be regulated (…and I was discussing digital assets in the 1990’s BTW).
Crypto winter was preceded by a typical phenomenon of emerging technologies and the investments surrounding them: a bubble. Pre-crypto winter, last year all was so glorious in the crypto world that it seemed permanently vast profits would flow to all.
Amongst the casualties in this switch from bubble to bear market has been transaction volume. A lot of holders are under water and reluctant to sell. Fewer still are motivated to buy in when the outlook is murky for future investment.
Ultimately crypto winter will give way to a new bull market but in the meanwhile a lot of folks are left holding babies of significant size. Key amongst these are crypto exchanges.
This is a curious area when compared with the legacy markets which are predominantly heavily regulated and compliant. Moreover, a key feature (well, bug) of the crypto V1.0 markets has been their high transaction costs which has made crypto unique in fintech terms: a tech innovation which is more expensive to buy than the technology it is supposed to replace!
Anyway, by the middle of last year — if not before — it had become almost impossible to monitor all the world’s crypto exchanges. As of the time of writing: the situation for exchanges? #ItsComplicated.
Thus our data mavens have been off digging around to work out just what has happened to crypto exchanges during 2022 and the net result is we have some markets which have clearly closed, a few which have been proven to be scams (and closed) while a third category was prosaically termed “Missing In Action.” It is in some ways a fitting testimony to the early cowboy era of crypto that in the end some exchanges just disappeared as opposed to entering an orderly closing period, let alone announcing in any public form that they were closing down.
Here are some charts and diagrams with closure dates of some markets as well as a list of the “MIA” markets and that amounts to a total of 23 markets so far in 2022.
Here is the table of Crypto Exchange Closures.
If you know of others or have additional information on the platforms marked “MIA” leave a message in the comments or DM us, thank you.
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