With it being a little over a year since the OTC trading of cryptocurrencies became famous, popular and preferred, the OTC trading stall at Circle has come back with statistics of the previous year.

The over-the-counter trading stall at Circle, a peer-to-peer payments platform, has reported a cryptocurrency sale of more than $24 Billion over 2018. They released these statistics as a post on their Medium.

According to their statement, they managed to facilitate over 10,000 OTC trades with 600 different counterparts across the world with a $24 billion volume. The statistics according to their blog post is;

“This customer activity was highly distributed, with approximately 30% of volume coming from the United States, 25% from the EU and UK, 24% from Asia and 21% from Middle East, Africa and Americas (excluding USA).”

Circle, last year alone, has partnered with many institutional investors, banks and financial industry bigwigs for entrance into the cryptocurrency market. For the coming year, Circle has outlined their main objectives;

“This year, we anticipate further incremental growth in institutional adoption catalyzed by stablecoin usage, advancements in institutional custody solutions, increasing regulatory clarity particularly in the [United States], and improvements and innovation in core crypto infrastructure.”

Rise Of OTC Trading

The year of 2018 saw a lot of drastic changes in the global cryptocurrency scenario.

This is because the 2017 bull changed a lot of minds and proved to be a better investment than any other stock options.

With that being the case, many institutional investors, financial companies and traditional stock investors, wanted to get into the market. But because of regulations and general security shortcomings, many of them stayed away.

But then came the OTC trading facility which totally did away with the cryptocurrency exchange system altogether. Making it a lot easier for institutional investors to get into the market without having to depend on any third-party clients and exchanges.

This is one of the major reasons that OTC cryptocurrency trading has picked up over the past year. Over the last year, institutional investors have become spoilt for choice over OTC trading stalls because almost every major company now has an OTC trading stall.

Though 2018 was a sluggish year for the cryptocurrency market and its individual assets, the regulations around it and the way the market has matured made 2018 a breakthrough year. OTC’s are one of biggest trends of the cryptocurrency market in 2018.

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Ramaa Mohan