Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, compared FTX's bankruptcy to the collapse of Mt. Gox to assess how it will affect the ecosystem.
Eric Jardine, research lead at Chainalysis, first compared the market shares of the two companies in a Twitter thread on Nov. 23. He discovered that Mt. Gox averaged 46% of all exchange inflows in the year before its 2014 collapse, compared to FTX's average of 13%, which ran from 2019 to 2022.
He came to the conclusion that FTX represented a relatively lesser portion of the cryptocurrency market than Mt. Gox did at the time and that the market would recover more powerfully than ever.
Jardine observes that when Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014, centralized exchanges (CEXes) were the only players in the game, whereas by late 2022, decentralized exchanges (DEXes) such as Uniswap and Curve had seized approximately half of all exchange inflows.
Jardine does add, though, that FTX was gradually increasing market share while Mt. Gox's was constantly declining, and that business trends are important to examine.
"Mt. Gox was becoming one exchange among many during a period of growth for the category, taking a smaller share of a bigger pie," he pointed out. "FTX on the other hand was taking a bigger share of a shrinking pie, beating out other exchanges even as its raw tx volume declined."
The recovery of the cryptocurrency market following the collapse of Mt. Gox is then examined by Jardine, who discovered that activity quickly resumed after a year or so of stagnation in on-chain transaction volume.
Following a cyberattack in which Mt. Gox lost 850,000 Bitcoin BTC, the company shut down its website, ceased trading, and sought bankruptcy protection in February 2014.
Customers who deposited holdings on the exchange have still not received their money back, but the Mt. Gox Trustee declared on October 6 that creditors had until Jan. 10, 2023, to choose a form of payment for the allegedly held 150,000 BTC.
Jardine found that Mt. Gox was a "linchpin of the CEX category at a time when CEXes dominated," making it a bigger element of the crypto ecosystem than FTX was at the time of its collapse.
Jardine feels that, despite other circumstances such as Sam Bankman Fried's prominent public persona, the "comparison should give the industry optimism."
"There's no reason to think the industry can't bounce back from this, stronger than ever."
