The stagnation in the crypto market has discouraged newbies, but seasoned traders remain unfazed, the CEO of the EXMO cryptocurrency exchange said.
EXMO, an exchange with about $40 million in daily trading volume according to CoinGecko, has been catering mostly to traders in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but has been actively expanding in the U.K recently, said CEO Sergey Zhdanov.
In June, trading activity on both spot and derivative crypto markets contracted more than 40%, a report by CryptoCompare said.
“Retail traders who flocked into crypto in 2021 were set aback by the declining price,” Zhdanov said. “New people come with an assumption that [crypto] will be growing forever, but then it falls.”
Many new traders were drawn by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter rants about dogecoin, Zhdanov said. That was especially notable in the U.K., where EXMO has fewer users, and so knowing who the new traders were was more apparent.
“In January and February, when Elon Musk was tweeting [about DOGE], the first surge of interest happened. [British news outlet] Metro.co.uk wrote about it and provided a link to us, and 10,000 of new British users came, all after dogecoin,” Zhdanov said.
