Top Crypto App Downloads Rise Over 15% After SVB Collapse

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After a shake-up in the US banking system in the past week, crypto exchanges and wallets took off as some look for bankless alternatives.

The top 10 crypto apps for exchanges and wallets are up about 15% since Silicon Valley Bank’s shares fell 60% last week, according to a chart from real-time app data provider Apptopia. The top 10 crypto apps were defined as Coinbase, Crypto.com, Trust, Binance, Bitcoin and Crypto DeFi Wallet, Blockchain.com, KuKoin, Kraken, eToro and BitPay.

Meanwhile, top 10 traditional banks and top 10 “digital first” banking app downloads have declined over the same time frame by 5% and 3% respectively. The top 10 banking apps include Capital One, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Discover, Citi, and US Bank, among others. The top 10 digital apps were Chime, Dave, Albert, Empower, Varo, MoneyLion, Current, Aspiration, Sable and Oxygen.

Image credit: Apptopia (opens in new window)

The differences in downloads point to general concern across the US from customers amid the recent banking crisis.

Last week, Silvergate Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank all shut down or shut down, resulting in crypto companies and investors and traditional users scrambling to move their assets.

The closure of these banks led to larger questions about where people and companies should park their assets and which banks they can (or cannot) trust.

Other medium-sized and regional banks, including First Republic, have been under pressure since SVB’s collapse. First Republic had the third-highest share of uninsured U.S. deposits behind SVB and Signature with about $119.5 billion in uninsured deposits, according to Reuters.

The crypto market is showing a “positive contagion” after the SVB collapse, similar to what happened in 2020 when investors fled traditional markets during the COVID-19 pandemic in favor of alternative assets, Stefan Rust, CEO of inflation data aggregator Truflation and former CEO of Bitcoin .com, previously told TechCrunch+.

In the wake of all this chaos, bitcoin and ether, the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, had seven-day gains of around 15% and 9%, respectively, at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap data. The global market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies also rose 8.3% in the same time period to about $1.1 trillion, down slightly from a weekly high of $1.14 trillion on Tuesday, the data showed.

All in all, the market frenzy has apparently created a bullish mood in the crypto economy; As traders reacted positively to the news, overall market capitalization rose this week and crypto app downloads increased.