Results of 2024: Binance loses leadership, Ethereum cuts fees by 99%, AI integrates into Web3

In December 2024, major cryptocurrency exchanges recorded an increase in trading volumes: spot trading increased by 14%. Interestingly, Bitget led this indicator with a growth of 102%, while derivative trading volumes grew by 6%, where Gate showed a record increase of 111%.

 

Overall, the volume of spot trades in 2024 increased by 139% compared to 2023, writes WuBlockchain. The largest increases were demonstrated by:

• Crypto.com: +960%
• Bybit: +392%
• Gate: +244%

Lower indicators were recorded at:

• BitMart: +78%
• Upbit: +83%
• Binance: +92%

Derivative trades increased by 91% compared to the previous year:

• Crypto.com: +930%
• Bitget: +209%
• Mexc: +172%

The smallest growth was recorded at:

• KuCoin: +10%
• Binance: +48%
• HTX: +65%

Website traffic for cryptocurrency exchanges increased by 22% in 2024. The highest growth rates:

• Bitget: +103%
• Mexc: +57%
• Bybit: +54%

Meanwhile, significant losses were recorded at:

• HTX: -99%
• Bitfinex: -56%
• Deribit: -10%

Overall, in 2024, Binance lost market share in spot trading: falling from 49% to 39%, and also in the contracts market—from 50% to 38%. Meanwhile, Bybit quickly strengthened its position in the spot segment, becoming second only to Binance.

Additionally, year-end reviews by Crypto.com showed that in 2024, countries around the world began to overcome inflation, allowing leading central banks to reduce interest rates for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. The global economy remained resilient despite regional geopolitical conflicts.

• Global GDP is expected to grow by 3.2% in 2025, slightly less than 3.3% in 2023.
• The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies in 2024 increased by 127%, reaching $3.9 trillion. The launch of American spot ETFs for BTC and ETH was one of the key moments of the year. BTC-ETFs attracted assets amounting to $30.7 billion as of November 29, while ETH-ETFs attracted $577 million. The price of Bitcoin exceeded $100,000 on December 5th thanks to ETFs, the US presidential election, and the fourth network halving.
• The Dencun update, implemented in March 2024, reduced transaction costs in the Ethereum L2 network by 99%. In August, Cronos Labs launched the main Cronos zkEVM network, focused on scalability and security.
• Solana rose to fifth place in terms of capitalization, with 67% of new tokens launched in 2024.
• The play-to-airdrop (P2A) model, including Hamster Kombat, attracted 300 million players by August 2024.
• The total value of tokenized assets (RWA) increased by 62%, reaching $13.6 billion. The main contribution was made by tokenized US government bonds (+239%).

In 2025, more countries are expected to start building reserves in BTC, which will stabilize prices and contribute to their growth, and the number of cryptocurrency owners could reach 750–900 million. The planned Ethereum Pectra update is aimed at improving network performance, providing an account abstraction (EIP-7702), increasing the staking limit for validators to 2048 ETH (EIP-7251), and increasing L2 throughput (EIP-7742, EIP-7691).

Regulatory clarification for stablecoins is expected, thanks to the MiCA legislation in the EU and Hong Kong laws.

ETF launches for Solana (SOL) and XRP, as well as the proactive policy of the administration of the elected US President Donald Trump, may stimulate new waves of cryptocurrency adoption.

The development of decentralized computing, AI agents, and data tokenization will remain a central theme.