By Mark Ackman
While centralized exchanges have seen their withdrawals rise after the downfall of the FTX crypto exchange in the previous week, decentralized exchanges (DEX) have seen their trading volumes rise.
However, they are not the only ones to have benefitted from the FTX fiasco. As it turns out, it has also worked in favor of hardware wallet manufacturers, including Trezor and Ledger.
Both of the companies saw the sales of their wallets shoot up last week, as people turned towards self-custody options for safeguarding their crypto assets.
Hardware wallets
The private keys of users with hardware crypto wallets are kept offline, which makes them a great deal more secure than other options.
As opposed to software wallets, they are not vulnerable to online attacks, but they are not completely impenetrable because phishing attacks have certainly occurred.
Nonetheless, in an industry like crypto which is mostly unregulated and centralized exchanges and lenders have opaque finances with a reputation of mishandling and sequestering customer funds, these wallets are a blessing.
Therefore, many consider hardware devices from Trezor and Ledger as good alternatives. The same is obvious when you check the sales figures of these wallets from the previous week.
Booming sales
Pascal Gauthier, the chief executive of Ledger, confirmed that their sales had indeed seen a good boost. He said that the previous week recorded the highest number of sales in the firm’s history.
He added that they expected to beat their all-time high this week as well. The CEO said that it was apparent that people had realized that they should return to self-custody and decentralization.
Trezor also confirmed that they had seen a similar uptick in the demand for their hardware wallets. Bitcoin analyst Joseph Tetek reported that there had been an exponential increase in Trezor’s sales since November 7th.
But, he also added that while they were happy to see more interest in self-storage solutions, they were not pleased that the current rise in demand was due to the huge losses people have suffered on FTX.
The DEX rises
The decentralized exchange, which is aptly named DEX, is also a self-custody solution that has seen its popularity go up since last week.
Dune released statistics showing that the last week saw about $31 billion in crypto trades conducted on DEX.
It all began last Tuesday with the announcement of Binance about signing a non-binding agreement for buying FTX in which it did not disclose an amount.
The 24 hours after the announcement saw trade volumes double overnight on many exchanges. This included Uniswap, which saw a three times increase in trading volume, and also the DEX.
The only silver lining to the collapse of FTX is that people are no longer trusting centralized solutions blindly.
The industry is now focusing on buzzwords like ‘self-custody’ and ‘security’, due to which decentralized finance (DeFi) is seeing a lot of traffic.
Centralized crypto exchanges have also seen a rise in withdrawals from their platforms, despite many of them reassuring their clients.