Taiwan's mainstream technology media "Digital Times" recently reported that the FTX incident affected at least "500,000" users in Taiwan, and quoted a long comment from the spokesperson of the exchange Pionex. What is puzzling is where did the number "500,000" come from? Are there so many FTX users in Taiwan?

Internet excerpt from "Digital Age" Where did the 500,000 users in the Digital Age come from?

"The exchange Crypto.com once made statistics that about 5% of the world's population holds cryptocurrency. Taiwanese industry estimates that the domestic currency holder population is about 1 million. If FTX is the second-ranked company, it is affected by this in Taiwan. The population affected by the incident should be about 500,000 to 600,000." The article wrote that this inference seems very rough.

According to October data from the Ministry of Interior, Taiwan’s population is about 23 million people. If calculated at 5%, it is about 1.15 million people; although FTX was once the exchange second only to Binance, the trading volume is still very different. Binance had more spot and derivatives trading volume in October than all other exchanges combined. Therefore, the number of 500,000 users is suspected to be too exaggerated.

FTX Taiwan users may be 120,000

Sources revealed that in February this year, FTX had at least five million global users, with a rough estimate of half a million users in the Chinese area. Taiwan's monthly active transaction users account for about 40% of the Chinese area. Assuming that monthly active users are linearly proportional to the total number of users, the number of registered users in Taiwan in February this year may be 210,000. Since there are different KYC levels after registration, the proportion of reaching the highest level of identity authentication KYC 2 is about 50~60%.

Therefore, based on 60% of the 210,000 registrations, the number of KYC 2 people in February was only 126,000. If users who successfully withdraw their funds are deducted, the number of people truly affected will be less than this number.

This calculation is also closer to FTX’s active trading user data in October. Sources revealed that in Taiwan, there were only about 10,000 active trading users on the FTX exchange in October, while less than 15,000 users of the FTX App (Blockfolio) had opened Earn in October.

Sources say these are rough calculations but that 500,000 users is an exaggeration.

This article is mainly based on the remarks of Paiwang spokesperson

In any case, the main length of this article is the comments of the spokesperson of Pionex, explaining the four major identification indicators from the perspective of the exchange; the article also quoted the remarks of Du Junzhi, the founder of the Chinese exchange Huobi.

Internet excerpt from "Digital Age" The gap between technology media in the non-currency circle

"Digital Times", one of Taiwan's largest technology media, has recently begun preparations for the blockchain media brand "We3 Plus", which is expected to create a new atmosphere for Taiwan's blockchain media ecology.

Internet excerpt from "Digital Age"

However, like most mainstream technology media in Taiwan, current reports related to blockchain and cryptocurrency are prone to being criticized by the currency circle.

Taking the 11/11 community tweet as an example, "Digital Times" was unable to distinguish the fact that FTX is a centralized exchange and not "decentralized finance" (DeFi), and even mentioned that "we should protect ourselves in the metaverse" ” Such an irrelevant description.

Mainstream technology media, which has greater traffic and audio-visual audiences, may still have a way to go before the public can understand blockchain and cryptocurrencies unambiguously.

This article is exclusive | "Digital Times" claims that FTX affects 500,000 users in Taiwan? Source: FTX Taiwan has only 120,000 users. First appeared on Chain News ABMedia.