• USDC’s de-pegging event caused a surge in usage and balance on centralized exchanges (CEXs).
• Proof of reserves helped to establish trust and transparency for customers using CEXs.
• As a result, the market caps of BNB, OKB, and KCS have all seen an increase.
USDC’s De-Peg Impact on CEXs
The USDC stablecoin deviating from its peg caused a drop in Externally Owned Addresses (EOAs) on Ethereum by $4 billion in value. Despite this adverse effect on the cryptocurrency sector, centralized exchanges (CEXs) managed to reap significant gains during this time. Activity on CEXs hit a 12-month high due to the de-pegging event and exchanges such as Binance, OKX, and Kraken saw an uptick in activity.
Proof of Reserves Establishes Trust
In order to regain customer trust following the FTX incident, numerous long-term users needed assurance that their funds were secure with these exchanges. This is where proof of reserves came into play – it allowed customers to view the overall percentage distribution of all assets stored by CEXs. Binance, KuCoin, and OKX provided this service for their customers which further established trust between them.
Consequences for Exchange Tokens
The fall of USDC coupled with the trust gained by CEXs through providing proof of reserves helped generate interest in their tokens as well. Over the last few days, the market caps of BNB, OKB, and KCS have all increased significantly due to sustained user interest in these tokens.
Data Analytics
Messari provided data which showed that at the time of writing, Binance was leading in terms of exchange balance with $31.9 billion followed by OKX and Bitfinex with $5.1 billion and $3.2 billion respectively. Dune Analytics also reported similar findings regarding this surge in usage among various CEXs after USDC’s de-peg incident occurred.
Conclusion
Despite some disruption caused by USDC’s de-peg situation on different aspects within the cryptocurrency sector, centralized exchanges were able to take advantage from this situation by reaping rewards from increased user activity due to heightened security measures being put into place such as providing proof of reserves for customer assurance . Furthermore , sustained interest from various users over this period has also resulted in an increase market caps for several major exchange tokens such as BNB , OKB , and KCS .