February 16, 2021: Cross Examination ✝️🕵️
Curve Market Recap
Here are today’s trends to watch from Curve Market Cap:
When we last dug into Curve’s cross-asset trends it was still quite new. Now that the feature is more established, we thought it would be a good time to see which trends are persisting. All data are scraped from the telegram log channels covering February month to date.
Many of the early trends we identified are a bit different in early February than late January. In particular, here’s what we see:
SELL USD
People are dumping dollars like they’re going out of style. Of $150MM in volume, about two thirds were people selling out of USD.
This reverses January’s trend. When we first looked into things, USD was more of a destination than an origin. In February, dollarcoins saw about a 5:1 outflow to inflow ratio by total amount.
Did something happen to the dollar between then and now? 🤔
It’s not necessarily all bad news for US Dollar bulls, as we’ll see in the next section. We do know that if volume is moving out of US Dollars, it has to go someplace…
BUY CRYPTO
Of the $150MM in volume we tracked, 2/3 were conversions into crypto. This was fairly evenly split between Bitcoin and Ether. The activity is probably slightly more favorable towards BTC than ETH, given that BTC had overall a 4:1 buy-sell ratio, versus ETH’s 2:1
Is this necessarily bullish for crypto? One could construct an argument for either position. We can find a bit more nuance by digging in to number of transactions and average transaction size:
As we see, the largest number transactions were actually USD buys, it’s just that they all happened to be relatively small volume.
Whale vs Retail
If we break it down as whale moves >$1MM and retail moves <$500K, then we observe some pretty clear splits. Whales are buying crypto, retail investors buying fiat. Combining our above volume and number graphs, we see a clear story with average transaction sizes:
The average transaction size was $2MM for buying BTC, with $1.5MM for ETH. By contrast, people moving to fiat saw average volumes of $315K USD and $244K worth of EUR.
The most commonly performed transaction was a USD to EUR move of about $270K. This ended up a small fraction of total volume though, due to the outsized effect of the whale moves. Crypto to Euro transactions were noticeably quite small — $60-$80K, while crypto to USD buys tended to range from $250-$375K.
To get the full picture, we’d need to do a deeper dive on where the money came from and where it moves to after touching Curve. Until somebody conducts this type of robust analysis, the story we’ll tell ourselves is this: whales are parking their money in BTC, then withdrawing a quarter million whenever their yacht needs a new coat of paint.
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a $CRV staker and perma-bull.