WazirX trading volume sinks 76% to $10 billion in 2022

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WazirX clocked a trading volume of over $10 billion till 30th November of 2022, a drop from $43 billion in 2021, the crypto exchange said in its latest report. The year 2022 has been one of the toughest years for crypto after a massive bull run with global exchanges filing for bankruptcies, significant drop in new users amid the volatile market prices among other issues.
The exchange said it signed up 2,122,925 new users this year and 27 percent of the first-time crypto buyers on WazirX bought Shib tokens.

The top tokens which were traded on WazirX were BTC, USDT, SHIB, WRX, ETH, TRX, DOGE, MATIC.

ChiliZ token (CHZ), the official token of the Socios.com fan voting portal, gained traction ahead of the FIFA world cup. The token offers voting rights to fans for activities related to their favorite teams and players.

Interestingly, Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover also impacted the trading volume of Doge which went up by 1300 percent compared to the previous week at that time.  For the uninitiated, Musk has been tweeting about Doge coin making it quite popular among the traders.

The report added, “The volume dipped when the deal apparently fell through. However, towards the end of October, when the Twitter acquisition by Elon was near completion, the trading volumes went up significantly by 3000 percent despite low trading volumes in the previous few weeks.”

The exchange said that its new feature of gift cards, where users can send WRX tokens to each other, saw a sale of a total of Rs 11 lakhs, with 50percent of the gift cards bought during Diwali.

Women vs men

Here’s how women and men traded on the platform.

Women traded 20 percent of the top tokens traded on the platform, on an average. Also, women in the age group of 41-60 and above have transacted more than men in the same age group. Women in the age group of 26-40 contributed to 46 percent of the total trading volume.

The report added that women traded more blue chip tokens (tokens which are perceived of high value in the long run with high liquidity).

On the other hand, men between the ages of 18-40 transacted more than men in the other age groups. They also invested in meme tokens, gaming tokens, etc., besides blue chip tokens.

WazirX has been seeing a slew of exits in the past year after co-founders Nischal Shetty and Siddharth Menon announced their new projects in the Web3 domain. In October, the exchange even laid off 40 percent of its staff a few months after Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said it did not own WazirX, an acquisition deal which was understood to be completed back in 2019. Additionally, in India, a mix of regulatory uncertainty, hefty taxation, and declining cryptocurrency prices have taken a toll on startups, exchanges, and companies in the sector.