Here are some of the key takeaways from analyzing the CEX flows on Avalanche:

• There is a huge difference in the transferred volume and the asset transferring users whether the internal transfers are included or not.
• While the transferred volume had a downward trend during 2022, it increased considerably at the beginning of 2023.
• The number of asset receivers has remained relatively the same throughout the measured period.
• Binance and Huobi had the largest share of both inflows and outflows.
• While the volume of inflows was higher than the outflows on all of the exchanges, Houbi had the opposite situation.
• Houbi has started to gain a considerable share of the transferred volume since the summer of 2022.
• More than 15k addresses exited Huobi to enter the Avalanche ecosystem, while Binance had a share of fewer than 5k addresses.
• The increase in Huobi's asset receivers reached a weekly count of 2k addresses in late 2022 with a share of around 80%.
• USDT and USDC were the dominant transferred tokens by volume, having a total share of around 95% combined.
• Addresses that exited Binance were the most active users by conducting more than 460k transactions.
• While Huobi's transferred volume was relatively similar to Binance, users entering Avalanche from this exchange was only active 1/8th of those exiting Binance.

Avalanche is a blockchain platform designed to provide high throughput, low latency, and interoperability for decentralized applications (dApps) and enterprise-level blockchain solutions. It utilizes a unique consensus mechanism called Avalanche consensus, which allows for near-instant finality and ensures the security of the network. The platform also features subnets that enable developers to create and customize their own blockchain networks, while still benefiting from the security and scalability of the main Avalanche network. Avalanche aims to provide a fast and efficient infrastructure for building decentralized finance (DeFi), supply chain management, and other blockchain-based solutions.

To analyze the inflows and outflows of assets into and from the centralized exchanges on Avalanche, the data on the Avalanche Core's ez_avax_transfers and ez_token_transfers were used. These tables were joined by the dim_labels table to label both the sender and receiver addresses. Next, those addresses having a receiver or sender with a CEX label were filtered to obtain the data for inflows and outflows, respectively.

Point of View

The current analysis was conducted from the perspective of the exchanges, hence, the inflows and outflows terms refer to the assets transferred into and out of the exchanges, respectively. In other words, the outflowing assets from the centralized exchanges could be interpreted as those entering the Avalanche ecosystem.

Internal Transfers

After selecting all the transfers into and from the CEXs, the analysis broke down into two directions, which are both presented in the Overview tab of this dashboard and could be selected using the InternalTransfers parameter above the page for the others. Here, the "internal transfers" term refers to those transactions that involve addresses belonging to the same exchange. For example, a user from Binance sends assets to another address with Binance.

The author of this dashboard believes that these transfers should not include in the analysis of token flows into and from the centralized exchanges to have a proper estimate of user activity interacting with each of these exchanges. However, since many might think otherwise, the ability to switch between the option made available through the parameter.

The analysis of inflows and outflows of assets has demonstrated that there is a massive difference between the two conditions of flows with and without internal transfers. While the transferred volume was around #30b including the internal transfers, the real volume was around $4b inflowing and outflowing from the CEXs. From the user's perspective, although nearly 500k addresses interacted with each other within the exchanges, the real number of external addresses sending assets into the exchanges was less than 100. The number of users receiving tokens from CEXs was around 21k.