Global P2P trade volume plummets amid crypto crash

The recent crypto market slump has driven massive trade volumes on centralized exchanges, but peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platforms actually saw a sharp decline in activity.

Latin-America was the only region to buck the trend.

The top region for P2P trade, the United States, posted a 42% slump in peer-to-peer volume this week — plummeting from $23.4 million to nearly $13.6 million.

Sub-Saharan African has been the second-largest region for P2P trade after North America for much of 2020. It saw P2P volume fall 32%, from roughly $12.9 million to $8.7 million — driven by a 38% crash in Nigerian activity.

Trade in the Asia-Pacific also crashed by 25% this week.

Latin America was the only region to post a significant increase in P2P trade volume this past week, gaining 11% to $13.2 million.

43% of Latin trade took place in Venezuela this week, with the country representing two-thirds of the volume increase produced by the region. Colombia, Peru, and Chile also posted volume increases of between 10% and 20%, while Mexico and Brazil saw notable slumps in trade.

Curiously, nearly all of the drop in volume was attributable to the top P2P platform Paxful, with every region on Localbitcoins (except for Sub-Saharan Africa which retraced 2%) actually seeing a weekly increase in trading.

Roughly $42 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) changed hands on Localbitcoins this past week, while Paxful hosted less than $20 million in trade — down from roughly $38 million last week.

By contrast, top spot exchange Coinbase hosted roughly $1.7 billion in trade over the past seven days, while Bitstamp’s weekly volume was $1.1 billion.