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Retail Interest Lags as Trading Volume on Exchanges Increases
- Despite recent market gains, everyday investors remain on the sidelines.
- Coinbase’s low ranking across multiple app stores, paired with Google search data, suggests retail isn’t fully onboard with the crypto comeback.
- However, new data from Swyftx suggests that the trend might be beginning to flip as new investors slowly make their way back to crypto exchanges.
Bitcoin and the crypto market have enjoyed a spectacular end to 2023. For example, most major coins – BTC, SOL, and ETH – have posted gains of 20%+ in the past few months. And yet, as the price of Bitcoin threatens to breach the USD $50k (AUD $74.6k) milestone, widespread hype and media attention are still lagging. While this suggests that the lengthy crypto winter will take a bit longer to properly thaw, it also means that retail investors aren’t really coming back into the fray. It will take the re-entry of this demographic – your average 20–40-year-old casual investor – for the Bitcoin bull market to well and truly kick in.
Institutional Investment Leading the Charge
Retail trading volume has remained low, although overall movement on exchanges has started to pick up in the final quarter of 2023. To reiterate the lack of retail interest, we just need to look at Coinbase’s ranking in the smartphone app stores. It currently sits at #24 for finance apps – higher than its all-time low of #28 in September, but significantly below its peak of #1 in October 2021. On top of this, search rankings for “crypto” on Google are still 50% lower than the 2022 average, even though the market has performed much better over the past 12 months.
Although the everyday investor hasn’t returned to the crypto market, institutional investments are holding the recent rally afloat. In particular, the potential introduction of a Bitcoin spot ETF has already attracted several major players to the market, and may bring in even more attention from global financial giants.
It’s not all bad news for retail investment though, as Pav Hundal from Australian exchange Swyftx says the company is starting to see a bump in user numbers.
In November, we saw a 30% increase in the number of users trading when compared to last month. In this same time period, we also noticed a 40% increase in the number of new user registrations.
Pav Hundal Hundal went on to say that while retail interest remained subdued, it has been a helpful period for crypto exchanges to analyse their demographics and learn more about customer trends.
The last few months…have been a hallmark period in Swyftx understanding consumer behaviours and crypto. We have the survey data to back that 23% of Aussies plan to buy crypto in 2024.
Pav Hundal 
Author
Ben Knight
Ben Knight is a writer and editor from Melbourne with a passion for all things music and finance. He enjoys turning complex topics – especially the technical details of cryptocurrency – into digestible bites that anybody can understand. He acquired his Master’s in Writing, Editing and Publishing from RMIT in 2019 and has run his own creative writing business ever since.
