Spot, perps, and on-chain volumes for December — where activity actually concentrated, the venues quietly winning share, and what's signal vs. seasonality.
December is always a noisy month for volume data — holiday trading, year-end rebalancing, and tax-loss harvesting all distort the underlying signal. With that caveat, the December prints reveal three trends our desk thinks are durable into Q1.
Spot volume on centralized venues was down 12% month-over-month, but the distribution shifted. Binance share contracted by roughly 4 percentage points, Coinbase held flat, and the gainers were Bybit, OKX, and a long tail of regional venues. The concentration story of 2023 is reversing — share is fragmenting, not consolidating.
Perpetuals open interest hit a fresh ATH despite the spot drawdown. That's a leverage-led market structure, and historically this kind of divergence resolves with a violent unwind. Funding rates that finish the month positive while spot drifts lower are our least favorite setup for going long into January.
On-chain DEX volume was the bright spot. Solana posted its third consecutive month above $100B in DEX volume, narrowing the gap with Ethereum mainnet to under 20%. The composition matters: Solana volume is dominated by memecoin trading on Pump.fun, Raydium, and Meteora. Ethereum DEX volume is more evenly split across blue-chip DEXs and is increasingly an inter-protocol settlement layer.
What we're watching for January: a continuation of share fragmentation on CEX spot, a perp deleveraging event in the first two weeks, and whether Solana DEX share crosses Ethereum's for any individual day — which would be a first and a real symbolic moment.
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