DEXs Hit Record 19.5% of Spot Crypto Volume in July

Decentralized exchanges captured 19.5% of combined spot crypto volume in July after centralized exchange spot trading fell 31.2% to $727 billion and DEX volume declined 9.82% to $176 billion. The centralized spot total was the lowest monthly figure since October 2023.

Data for major centralized venues show spot trading declined faster than derivatives in July. Spot volumes on leading centralized exchanges fell about 35.5% month over month, while perpetual futures volumes dropped roughly 19.6%. Website traffic to major centralized exchange platforms rose about 3.0% even as app downloads fell about 2.1%.

Quarterly platform results and industry estimates point to weaker retail spot activity on centralized venues. A trading app recorded $18 billion in crypto volume in the second quarter, a 35% year-over-year decline, while its equity and options activity rose 85% and 50%, respectively. A major exchange reported consumer crypto spot volume down 38% year over year in the same quarter, with derivatives and prediction markets partially offsetting the decline. A separate estimate put retail-oriented global crypto activity at $979 billion in the first quarter, an 11% year-over-year contraction.

On-chain professional activity and arbitrage between venue types remained significant. An academic study covering August 2023 through March 2025 identified about 7.2 million arbitrage trades between centralized and decentralized venues on Ethereum that extracted roughly $233.8 million in value; three searchers captured about 75% of the extracted value.

Infrastructure for routing larger on-chain trades accounted for a sizeable share of DEX activity. A 30-day DEX aggregator metric measured $73.2 billion in volume led by platforms that route orders across pools. By chain, Solana registered roughly $49.5 billion in on-chain activity for July, ahead of BNB Chain, Ethereum and Base. Stablecoin pairs accounted for about $31.5 billion, near 30% of monthly DEX volume.

Research and market structure studies show venue roles vary by asset. Bitcoin price discovery continues to run mainly through centralized exchanges, exchange-traded funds and CME futures because native BTC liquidity on DEXs is a small part of global trading. Major Ethereum pairs also tend to follow centralized venues, while long-tail tokens, Solana-native launches and memecoins often trade on-chain before appearing on centralized platforms. Academic work has found that DEX trades paying high priority fees can contain especially informative order flow and that DEX execution becomes relatively more competitive for larger trades because fixed gas costs affect small orders more heavily.

Market makers and execution desks have expanded the signals they monitor to include on-chain pool depth, aggregator routing and priority-fee activity. Execution desks handling large orders increasingly route trades on-chain as gas costs are diluted across bigger sizes. Arbitrage opportunities between thinned centralized spot books and on-chain venues persisted, with captured profits concentrated among a small number of integrated actors.

Factors that affect where volume flows and which venues lead price discovery include aggregator performance, chain-level activity and changes in retail spot trading during price rallies in major assets.