From the advent of the crypto market, centralized exchanges (CEXs) have played a key role in providing liquidity to both retail and institutional users. In 2025 alone, CEXs processed nearly $80 trillion in volume across spot and perpetuals markets. However, since 2024, DEXs have been capturing more market share as they transition from ‘degen-only’ trading protocols, to products that can potentially rival even the best centralized avenues.
So, what is the state of crypto trading activity on both CEXs and DEXs, and how has it grown in the last two years?
We’ve summarized the key highlights, but be sure to dig into the full 14 slides in the full report below.
Top 5 Highlights of CoinGecko’s CEX & DEX Trading Activity Report 2026
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While the Most Prolific CEXs Listed Almost 100 Tokens Monthly, This Only Amounted to 0.01% of Tokens Created
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Spot Trading Volume Continues to be Dominated by CEXs, Even As DEX Market Share Doubles to 14%
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Perps Trading Volume Grows by 75% in Two Years, With DEX Share Expanding 5x to Reach 10%
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3 DEXs – PancakeSwap, Uniswap, Hyperliquid – Rank Among Top 10 Spot & Perps Exchanges
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Crypto Exchanges Record Over $2.4B Losses From Hacks & Exploits in Just Over a Year
1. While the Most Prolific CEXs Listed Almost 100 Tokens Monthly, This Only Amounted to 0.01% of Tokens Created
MEXC and Gate listed the most tokens among major CEXs in thirteen months, totaling 1,281 and 1,273 token listings respectively. In other words, these exchanges listed just under 100 tokens per month on average. Toobit followed behind with the third most token listings of 392, averaging 30 tokens listed per month.
On the other hand, Upbit, Crypto.com and OKX listed at a more conservative pace, totaling 100 tokens or less during the same period.
In comparison, most of the major DEXs listed significantly more tokens than CEXs, led by Uniswap (13.69 million) and Pump.fun (5.01 million). Only Curve and Hyperliquid listed at a slower pace that was similar to CEXs, totaling 1,029 and 103 respectively.
That said, token creation far outpaced exchange token listings, with GeckoTerminal recording 24.04 million new tokens created from January 2025 to January 2026. In other words, even the most prolific CEX listed only 0.01% of all tokens created during this period, while the widest coverage DEX listed 56.97%.
2. Spot Trading Volume Continues to be Dominated by CEXs, Even As DEX Market Share Doubles to 14%
The DEX market share of spot trading volume has steadily trended upwards in two years, doubling from 6.9% in January 2024, to 13.6% in January 2026. Absolute spot trading volume on DEXs has also more than doubled from $95.86 billion to $231.29 billion. This growth was largely propelled by the memecoin mania that began in May 2024.
At its peak in June 2025, DEXs accounted for 24.5% of spot trading volume, driven by the introduction Binance Alpha 2.0 routing trades through PancakeSwap.
Notably, DEX share of spot trading has remained above the 10% mark since January 2025. This reflects the maturing of the crypto market, as demand for onchain trading stabilizes with infrastructure improvements.
Nevertheless, CEXs still dominate as the primary venue, maintaining over $1 trillion in monthly spot trading volume during this period.
3. Perps Trading Volume Grows by 75% in Two Years, With DEX Share Expanding 5x to Reach 10%
The crypto perpetuals market has become increasingly popular over the last two years, with combined trading volume growing 75% from $4.14 trillion in January 2024, to $7.24 trillion in January 2026. As awareness and understanding of perps have become more mainstream, the perps market has even recorded volumes above $10 trillion in some months.
In particular, perp DEX volume has increased 8-fold, from $81.74 billion to $739.48 billion during the same period. As a result, DEXs have been able to capture 5 times more market share, expanding from just 2.0% of perps trading volume, to 10.2%. Perp DEXs experienced a resurgence on the back of Hyperliquid’s highly successful airdrop in November 2024, followed by the launch of competitors Lighter and Aster.
4. Three DEXs – PancakeSwap, Uniswap, Hyperliquid – Rank Among Top 10 Spot & Perps Exchanges
Binance continues to be the leading crypto exchange for both spot and perps trading. Over a six-month period from August 2025 to January 2026, Binance recorded $3.54 trillion and $13.61 trillion in cumulative spot and perps trading volume respectively. In comparison, exchanges that ranked second had less than half the cumulative volume.
PancakeSwap and Uniswap managed to break into the top 10 largest spot exchanges, with $0.55 trillion and $0.54 trillion in cumulative trading volume respectively. This placed the two spot DEXs ahead of major CEXs such as Bitget, OKX, Coinbase and Upbit.
Meanwhile, Hyperliquid was the only DEX to rank among the top 10 largest perps exchanges, with $1.59 trillion in cumulative trading volume during this period.
5. Crypto Exchanges Record Over $2.4B Losses From Hacks & Exploits in Just Over a Year
In the last year or so, CEXs have lost well over $2.0 billion to hacks and exploits, with 71% of the funds stolen during the Bybit hack in February 2025. The most common point of failure was compromised private keys, such that 3 of the top 5 exchange hacks occurred through social engineering and UI-phishing
In comparison, the top 5 largest DEX heists made up just 20.9% of the top CEX hack, with the largest attack resulting in $223 million worth of losses. Smart contract vulnerabilities were the most dangerous attack vector for DEXs.
A common key vulnerability for both CEXs and DEXs were market and oracle manipulation caused by errors from internal mechanisms, which was the case for Bitget, Binance and Hyperliquid.
Read the Report: CoinGecko’s CEX & DEX Trading Activity 2026
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