Bitcoin trading volume in China has crashed after local crypto exchanges added 0.2% transaction fee. Now Chinese platforms account for only 30% of world trading.

According to Bitcoinity, in the hour after midnight 24 January, one of the “big three” Chinese exchanges OKCoin registered only about 1,000 transactions denominated in renminbi, down from more than 4,800 an hour earlier. BTCChina registered 37,000 trades between 7 and 8 pm EST and just about 1,000 during the hour between midnight and 1 am EST of the next day, Zerohedge reports.

Overall, on 24 January, BTCChina, OKcoin and Huobi accounted for only about 30% of the world bitcoin trading, although a day earlier they provided more than 97%.

With the downfall of Chinese bitcoin trading, Bitfinex has taken the third place in the rating with 11.72% of the market share by volume. The second place now belongs to unidentified “others”, which means that almost 14.6% of the world bitcoin today trading is taking place on minor trading platforms. The biggest bitcoin exchange by its share in the world trading volume is OKCoin. BTCChina was pulled out to the fourth place with 11.09%. Huobi is no longer present in the top-10 of bitcoin trading platforms by market share. 

Kraken, Bitstamp and Coinbase, which earlier accounted for less than 1% of the market share each, now fluctuate around decent 10%.

The main reason behind the drastic drop of trade on the largest Chinese exchanges seems to be the introduction from 24 January of an extra 0.2% fee on bitcoin and litecoin operations on these trading platforms. This, in turn, happened as soon as the central bank of China reportedly found some “abnormalities” in the work of the exchanges.

Elena Platonova

Image via Flickr