Most "exchange volume" numbers you see are reported by the exchange. We did it the other way: we recorded every $BTC spot trade printed on 51 exchanges for seven days and added them up ourselves. The total was $130 billion. The breakdown is more interesting than the total.
1. Spot still beats derivatives — but only for bitcoin
Spot: $130.0B (61.5%)
Perpetual swaps: $76.6B (36.2%)
Inverse perps: $4.5B (2.1%)
Dated futures: $0.2B (0.1%)
Our perp coverage is partial (Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget, Gate, Hyperliquid and a few more), so the derivatives share is understated. Even so, bitcoin is one of the few coins where spot is still the bigger market. For most large altcoins, perps trade several times spot.
2. $BTC is a $USDT market
What was bitcoin bought with?
USDT: $109.2B — 84.0%
USDC: $11.1B — 8.6%
USD: $8.2B — 6.3%
KRW: $0.93B — 0.7%
EUR: $0.46B — 0.4%
Everything else combined: under $0.1B
Stablecoins are 92.6% of bitcoin's spot market. Only 7.4% touches a bank-account currency, and Coinbase alone is about half of that. The Korean won is the third-largest quote currency, ahead of the euro — almost all of it on Upbit and Bithumb.
Takeaway: anyone modelling bitcoin liquidity should treat Tether's health as a first-order risk, not a footnote.
3. A fifth of each day happens in three hours
Bucket 30 days of trades by hour (UTC):
13:00–16:00 UTC — the peak, $24–29B per hour-slot over the month. New York morning with London still open.
07:00–09:00 UTC — a second, smaller hump at $18–20B (European open).
20:00–21:00 UTC — the trough, about $11B.
The peak hour runs at 2.6× the trough. Three afternoon hours carry ~21% of the day's volume versus 12.5% if it were even. If you're placing size, the hour matters more than the venue: the same order that is absorbed quietly at 14:00 UTC moves price at 21:00.
4. Why raw volume rankings mislead
In one six-hour window, Binance printed 30,407 bitcoin trades at an average of $674 — a median of a few dollars, a 90th percentile near $3,000. That's what thousands of retail and algo participants look like. Several venues that out-rank Binance on raw weekly volume printed a few thousand trades at $6,000–40,000 average. Big totals, few participants.
We don't accuse anyone from prints alone. But a ranking that puts those venues above Binance doesn't tell you where bitcoin's price is formed. That's why our price index anchors on the cross-venue median before any volume weighting.
What to do with this
Trade between 13:00 and 16:00 UTC if you can; avoid 20:00–22:00 UTC if slippage matters.
Watch Tether, not just Coinbase — 84 cents of every spot dollar is USDT.
Read exchange league tables as "where the most dollars printed", not "where the market is".
All figures measured on the Coinmico trade index, seven days to 23 September 2026 (hour-of-day: 30 days). Live exchange data and the full methodology: coinmico.com