And in 2023 alone, 56 exchanges closed their doors.

I've analyzed The Exchange Graveyard data in a previous post, and decided to do a follow up accounting for 2023 data. Here are the results!

180 (~42.6%) exchanges "just vanished"

This means that no reason whatsoever was given to customers or society as a whole. These "just vanished". The categories and their percentages are:

• Business reasons: 111
• Hacked: 16
• Just disappeared: 180
• Rebranding: 52
• Regulatory Reasons: 33
• Scam: 32

BR - Business Reasons, H - Hack, JD - Just Disappeared, R - Rebranding, RR - Regulatory Reasons, S - Scam

These numbers represent an overall increase of 15.8% since the data was first analyzed.

328 (~77.4%) were Centralized Exchanges

51 were Decentralized Exchanges and 45 are classified as "others", since the data has also e.g. "Contracts Exchange" in their classification.

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CEX - Centralizec Exchanges, DEX - Decentralized Exchanges, Others - Contract Exchanges and such

TL;DR and advice

Most exchanges that closed down "just disappeared". Also the vast majority of these were centralized.

Use exchanges as exchanges and take control of your keys by having a cold storage. Heck, if you don't have the money to put on a cold storage unit just use a hot wallet of your choice. Make sure we avoid repeating 2013 and 2022.