Last week, GameStop shares (NASDAQ shares - ticker GME) and other equities were involved in a short-sell challenge between some large hedge funds and a Reddit group. The affair pushed the prices of these stocks higher and crushed the investors of the big hedge funds. Now, some of the excitement about this has spilled over into cryptocurrencies, causing CEX and DEX trading volumes to grow over the past week.
The volumes on the CEX increase and bring up the tokens
According to data site Skew, trading volumes for bitcoin futures on Binance and FTX increased over the weekend. Binance's BNB token hit a new all-time high of $ 50,27 during the first hours of trading in the US on Monday, while FTX's FTT token hit a record $ 12,95 on Friday, according to Messari data. .
John Todaro, director of research at TradeBlock, argues that last weekend's spike in traffic that pushed BNB and FTT to record highs is likely due to increased trading traffic from retail traders from the traditional stock market.
"Recent developments in the retail trading industry have shown that trading platforms, brokers and even exchanges can end some aspects of the trading process without much notice," Todaro said.
"This has prompted some retail traders to enter the cryptocurrency markets, as we have seen with dogecoin, xrp and stellar lumens which have grown significantly over the week."
In an effort to capitalize on the excitement around retail trading generated by GameStop stock dynamics, FTX last week listed a quarterly futures on the new WallStreetBets (WSB) index, named for the Reddit group behind the GameStop case. The index includes GameStop, Nokia (NOK), BlackBerry (BB), AMC Entertainment (AMC) plus iShares Silver Trust (SLV) shares due to the recent interest in silver.
UniSwap and SushiSwap pave the way for DEX
Activity in decentralized finance (DeFi) is picking up. Total DEX trading volume in January rose to an all-time high above $ 50 billion. On a seven-day basis, UniSwap and SushiSwap, the top two DEXs, took 48,8% and 23,3% of all DEX trading volumes respectively, according to Dune Analytics' DEX metrics tracker.
Meanwhile, Uniswap (UNI) and SushiSwap tokens surpassed their previous highs on January 31 and February 1, respectively, according to data from Messari's decentralized financial tracker. The number of Google searches for "Uniswap", the largest decentralized exchange by market capitalization, is nearly as high as last year's "DeFi summer" boom.
In addition to being an indicator of demand for DEXs, it also reflects the growing concerns of some traders about centralized trading platforms, with more and more people wanting to learn about decentralized exchanges like Uniswap.
