After a shake-up in the US banking system over the past week, crypto exchanges and wallets gained momentum as some looked for bankless alternatives.
The top 10 crypto applications for exchanges and wallets are up about 15% since shares of Silicon Valley Bank fell 60% last week, according to a chart from app data provider Apptopia. The top 10 crypto apps were defined as Coinbase, Crypto.com, Trust, Binance, Bitcoin and Crypto DeFi Wallet, Blockchain.com, KuKoin, Kraken, eToro and BitPay.
Meanwhile, downloads of the top 10 traditional banks and the top 10 “digital first” banking app downloads have declined over the same period, by about 5% and 3% respectively. The top 10 banking apps include Capital One, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Discover, Citi, and US Bank. The top 10 digital first apps were Chime, Dave, Albert, Empower, Varo, MoneyLion, Current, Aspiration, Sable and Oxygen.
Image Credits: Apptopia (Opens in a new window)
The difference in downloads points to general concerns among US customers during the recent banking crisis.
Last week, Silvergate Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank all shut down or shut down, prompting crypto companies and investors and traditional users to rush their assets to move.
The closure of these banks raised bigger questions about where people and businesses should park assets and which banks they can (or can’t) trust.
Other medium and regional banks, including First Republic, are under pressure after the bankruptcy of the SVB. First Republic had the third highest rate of uninsured U.S. deposits after SVB and Signature, with about $119.5 billion in uninsured deposits, according to Reuters.
The crypto market is showing a “positive contagion” after the collapse of the SVB, similar to what happened in 2020 when investors fled traditional markets during the COVID-19 pandemic in favor of alternative assets, Stefan Rust, CEO of inflation data aggregator Truflation and former CEO from Bitcoin.com, previously told AapkaDost+.
In the wake of all this chaos, bitcoin and ethereum, the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, had seven-day gains of about 15% and 9%, respectively, at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap data. The global market cap for all cryptocurrencies also rose 8.3% over the same period to about $1.1 trillion, slightly down from a weekly high of $1.14 trillion on Tuesday, the data showed.
The market frenzy has seemingly created bullish sentiment in the crypto economy; as traders reacted positively to the news, the total market cap rose during the week and crypto app downloads increased.
