Zoltan (@ph1102) mentioned the ranking by liquid HIVE in a conversation we had yesterday, and I had the curiosity to check it out. Obviously, many exchange accounts at the top, as custodians for customer funds. Much better than being at the top for stacked coins, lol... People who have been on this chain for a good while will understand the reference...
But here's what I discovered among them:
Bittrex, an exchange that terminated its trading activity since last year and only allows withdrawals currently for its global business (non-US), still has over 550k liquid HIVE in their main Hive account. That's HIVE on the exchange not withdrawn by anyone... yet.
The news of its closure was pretty well covered from what I remember. For example, at first hand I discovered a short article on CoinDesk about it.
I know I am pretty thorough with my funds, crypto or otherwise, but maybe not all are like me. And maybe I don't have enough to run into such issues. But what I know is if I don't want to track something anymore, I get rid of it and buy something I want to be involved in.
Anyway, it's not once I heard people say: "Hey, look, I discovered some holdings I forgot about! And... " here come the two options: " they went to zero!" or, "I have something there that is mooning, wow!". Well, I guess it's great if it's the latter and the right timing, not so much if it's the former.
So, I wonder why aren't these funds withdrawn from Bittrex... Here are the options I could think of:
- they missed the news about Bittrex closing down
- they forgot they had an account at Bittrex
- they forgot they had anything of value on Bittrex (but wasn't it worthy to check?)
- did Bittrex require KYC recently to move funds away? Most likely. Maybe someone simply wants to remain anonymous and prefers to lose the funds than to give up their privacy.
- I know it's not nice to talk trash about the dead, but are HIVE withdrawals still frozen on Bittrex, lol? And since trading is terminated, if that was the case, that HIVE would be trapped inside this dead CEX.
Whatever the case may be, I hope whoever hasn't withdrawn these HIVE takes action before it's too late. I haven't seen a deadline until which the withdrawals remain open, but I assume there is a time limit. I see they still pay support staff too, and they have no revenues, so, how long could this go on?
One other rather good piece of information I recently saw regarding HIVE and CEXes was in yesterday's stats report for HIVE supply on exchanges by @dalz. It is encouraging to see what could be a reverse in the uptrend of liquid HIVE on the exchange with highly restrictive access, Upbit, and an uptrend on Binance, which is at least a global exchange (well, except the US, because they like to be on the list with all the countries they impose sanctions to... Half joking, although I don't think it's funny for the regular Americans that have to go through the isolationism phase their country is moving through - I know it's not funny for us Europeans either, or at least not for me, in other situations).
What can I say? Adventures in the CEXes world... It seems like DEXes will eventually take over the majority of their operations, once DEXes become more convenient and easy to understand for users who don't adopt new things early on. It will likely be a mixture of rather centralized platforms working over more decentralized protocols, where the former hides some of the complexities of working with the protocol until the users find their interfaces simple and competitive enough to switch.
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