The cryptocurrency market in the last quarter of 2019

More than 10 years have passed since the birth of cryptocurrencies and, despite the numerous narratives made to justify their existence, none of them agree with the evidence shown by the data.

The quarterly CoinDesk Magazine presented the key data, trends and events that shape the cryptocurrency markets this month.

The results of this analysis indicate that a dominant narrative for alternative bitcoins and cryptocurrencies has not yet emerged.

Not everyone who made money sold

Bitcoin owners who made the last transaction in the second half of 2017 kept their bitcoins until the end of 2019, despite the increases in the market price that would have made the sale profitable.

This suggests that investors consider bitcoin to be a store of value rather than a speculative activity. At the end of 2018, Bitcoin had the latest surge in the number of users, thanks to the launch in the Coinbase exchange in December 2018.

Coinbase's bitcoin-fiat markets, among the most popular in the world for USD, GBP and EUR bitcoin purchases, have stalled since then.

According to Nomics data, the volume of bitcoin-fiat dropped from a record high of 46.54 million dollars in 2018 to 44.92 million dollars in 2019

Bitcoin's whale population is safe

At the end of 2019, there were 2,100 bitcoin addresses of 8.5 million dollars each. The increase in these millionaire addresses, also called bitcoin "whales", is an approximate indicator of the participation of large investors in cryptocurrencies.

Since 2018, the number of bitcoin whales has multiplied at rates that have not been seen since the early 2000s, when bitcoin was trading below $ 100, or 1/85 of its current market price.

Off-chain activity on regulated cryptocurrency exchanges in the United States does not agree with this figure for large investors. SkewAnalytics has reported a drop in volume for both CME and Bakkt bitcoin futures on the markets of interest opened in 2019.

These markets, unlike those of other popular cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance, are designed to offer regulated instruments to institutional investors.

DeFi blooms in the winter

One of the biggest successes of 2019 has been the decentralized financial applications (dapp). According to DeFi Pulse Analitycs, dapps have managed more than $ 680 million in cryptocurrencies overall.

Looking at the most popular sub-category of dapps, cryptocurrency loans, user traction on Ethereum continued to grow even when the market price for ETH started to decline.

In other categories of dapps such as gambling, the number of applications and users has decreased in 2019. The analysis company DappRadar said that the number of dapps is decreasing overall, while the quality of these applications is increasing. .

Aside from the DeFi boom on the ethereum blockchain, other dapp platforms have sprung up that are struggling to grow.