May was a good month for crypto and June could be better, a Binance research has suggested. Bitcoin moved higher from $5000 to $9000 and the top cryptocurrency exchange says the fifth month recorded much larger volumes on altcoins compared to March and April. Meanwhile, the report sees June as promising considering its expected “number of developments and releases on various altcoins”.

“We have definitely seen more interest from the non-crypto public this month, and hope that the market ‘behaves’ such that the interest continues to build,” it says. “However as the May 17th event showed, some large players can come in to move the markets and trigger a lot of big moves.”

Binance supports the suggestion that institutional demand is entering the space with the all-time high volumes of more than $1 bln traded over 24 hours recorded on the CME in May. It assumes that institutional investors, which currently represent less than 10% of all long-term investors, have been growing their exposure going by a premium of nearly 40% for Grayscale Bitcoin Trust over Bitcoin spot price at the end of May.

It projects that stablecoins “will further become the primary quote currency for cryptoassets in the future, taking over the historical role of Bitcoin as the leading quote currency.” This is going by quote asset volumes driven by stablecoins on Binance.  A comparison shows growth from over one-third of all volume (35.78%) May 2018 to over three-fifths (60.55%) by May 2019 eating into the market share of both BTC and ETH-denominated pairs.

JPM Coin 

A key stablecoin to focus on is J.P. Morgan’s JPM Coin. Launched Feb. 2019, it is the first to experiment as a new type of stablecoin that would rely on private blockchains. Binance believes JPM Coin is “marking a transition from an interest-collecting business model to one that is targeted at improving internal processes (e.g. clearing and settlement)”. The shift in the business model is from a pure profit-driven model to that which solves specific business use cases.

A perceived precursor of a third generation of stablecoins that targets a particular market segment: financial institutions, the exchange notes that JPM Coin might be a direct future competitor to Ripple. As a real-time settlement system, Ripple currently has over 100 institutional clients for its blockchain-powered alternative to SWIFT .