On Thursday (July 1), blockchain forensics startup Chainalysis published a research report that looked at the usage of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and stablecoins.
For the Q1 2021 period, the Chainalysis research team used “blockchain analysis to track transaction patterns and analyze the characteristics of the biggest wallets holding different types of cryptocurrencies.”
According to this report, which was published as a blog post earlier today, the top four categories (by transaction volumes) were
- Stablecoins: $869 billion
- Ethereum: $840
- Wrapped Ethereum (wETH): $635 billion
- Bitcoin: $623 billion
When Chainalysis looked at the supply of cryptocurrency by wallet holder category, they made the following discovery:
“73% of Bitcoin is held by investors, versus just 58% for Ethereum and 43% for the popular stablecoin USDT_ETH, which is an ERC-20 token version of Tether. Meanwhile, just 7% of all Bitcoin is held by traders, who tend to seek shorter-term gains by trading between a wider variety of assets, versus 18% for Ethereum and 14% for USDT_ETH. “
The report went on to conclude:
- Bitcoin’s main use case is investing for the long term.
- Ethereum is traded more often than Bitcoin and its main use is powering interesting new decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms.
- Stablecoins such as Tether are the most frequently traded type of cryptoassets and their main two use cases are trade settlement on exchanges and for parking money on exchanges while traders are waiting for fresh trading opportunities.
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.