Today I want to look at Hive exchanges from a different perspective. Instead of looking at at how much trading volume is there, how much Hive they are holding, or how much Hive is deposited and withdrawn, I simply want to ask what exchanges do most Hivers actually use?
Some Hive traders likely do not have a Hive account at all. A small number of whales can also make up the vast majority of trading volume or transfer volume, so it's not necessarily a reflection of what our users by and large are doing. As such, I present the charts below.
The first chart shows the number of unique depositors per exchange per day, from the very beginning of Steem. You can see that in the pre-2018 days Poloniex and Bittrex were king, then post Steem bubble 
I used a very large dataset and this is the most readable I could make the chart with per-day data. I may add some comments tomorrow with per-month data that I expect to be more readable.
Here is the same chart since the 2020 Hive exodus hard fork.
Above you can more clearly see how Binance, followed by Orinoco and then Honey-Swap are the leaders today in terms of how many Hivers use them.
Observations
Upbit and Bithumb dominate Hive financially which you can see if you follow the posts made by 
But in terms of the users of Hive and which exchanges they prefer, it is a very different story. We can especially see that OTC exchanges like Orinoco and Blocktrades have always been popular, and Binance is far more popular than the Korean exchanges among Hivers. The growth in popularity of a Hive DEX is also quite clear to see in recent years.