The collapse of FTX in November 2022 was the most consequential single event in crypto exchange history. It destroyed the second-largest exchange by volume, took several billion dollars of customer funds with it, and produced a regulatory response that has fundamentally altered the competitive dynamics of the exchange industry. Three years later, the consolidation that FTX’s collapse accelerated is still in its early stages.

The exchange industry’s structure before FTX was already oligopolistic. Binance, FTX, Coinbase, and a small number of other platforms accounted for the overwhelming majority of spot and derivatives trading volume. What appeared to be a competitive market was, on inspection, a highly concentrated one in which the second-place player’s existence owed more to regulatory arbitrage and aggressive fee subsidization than to sustainable competitive differentiation.