Crypto exchange stocks slide as trading activity dries up

Crypto industry’s Coinbase, Gemini, and Bullish are getting crushed. Their stocks have dropped as much as 55% over the last three months, while Bitcoin is down a little over 35% since its October peak. There’s no meltdown, no hacks, no lawsuits. Just silence. And that silence is hitting trading platforms the hardest.

These exchanges live and die by trading volume, and right now, that volume has dried up. No one’s trading. No one’s buying. No one’s selling. And when that happens, the fees stop rolling in. That’s their business model.

Coinbase’s Q4 trading activity likely dropped 40% from a year ago to $264 billion, said Owen Lau at Clear Street. He also said January numbers were even worse, as the platform is on track to bring in less than half of what it did during the same quarter last year.

Traders ditch exchanges as prices fall and interest fades

The latest plunge in crypto stocks isn’t just about Bitcoin falling under $80,000 over the weekend. It’s what that fall signals: that people are tired. That they’ve backed off completely.

Peter Christiansen at Citigroup said, “When prices are going up, people don’t want to miss out, so they trade. But if things go the other way, it’s hard to keep people in.”

It’s not just Bitcoin. Crypto-linked stocks are also being hit by investors pulling out of tech more broadly. People are nervous about the cost of AI, worried about war headlines, and tired of losing money on tech stocks. That mix has made everyone just step away from risk entirely.

Bitcoin has now fallen for four months straight, dropping nearly 11% in January alone. That’s the longest losing streak since the 2018 nosedive after the ICO bubble burst. And it’s not just Bitcoin. Gold dropped hard again on Monday after logging its worst week in more than ten years.

Gemini’s balance sheet is taking a hit. John Todaro from Needham & Co. said they were hoping to break even by 2027, but now that’s looking more like 2028.

Meanwhile, Bullish, which mostly handles institutional clients, saw trading activity fall 28% this January compared to last year, Lau said.

No scandal this time, just disappearing interest

Laurens Fraussen at Kaiko said we’re only “about 25% into this cycle.” He thinks we could still have another six to nine months of this before things start picking up again.

This slump feels weird. Usually, there’s something big behind it. In 2018, it was regulators cracking down on ICOs.

In 2022, it was FTX, Three Arrows Capital, and Terra-Luna blowing up. This time? Nothing. Just a fading crowd and a crash in October that wiped out a ton of leverage.

Even with new Bitcoin ETFs and years of infrastructure upgrades, trading activity is sinking. Kaiko’s data shows the drop is already starting to match the worst points of the last big downturn in 2021 and 2022.

But this time, people aren’t panicking. They’re just tuning out.

Some are still chasing leverage on decentralized platforms. Others are running toward whatever’s hot: AI tokens, prediction markets, sports betting, small tech stocks, even gold. But the big names like Coinbase and Gemini are left with a crowd that just doesn’t care.

A few have tried to build up other services like custody or stocks, but that won’t save them. Their entire business model depends on people trading. And right now, they’re not.

There’s a meeting scheduled later Monday between the crypto industry and the banking sector at the White House. The goal is to finally settle the Senate’s market-structure bill. Maybe that’ll wake the market up. But until then, the exchanges are learning that a crash isn’t the only way to get wrecked. Sometimes, all it takes is nothing at all.