More deposits, fewer wallets, smaller tickets — three weeks running

168,908

Deposits

a record

53,865

Active wallets

down 2.3%

$122

Average deposit

from $146 four weeks ago

+8.5%

Deposits, four weeks

on 0.7% fewer wallets

The market set a deposit record this week. It did so while its wallet count fell and its average ticket shrank.

Across four weeks, deposits are up 8.5% on 0.7% fewer wallets, and the average deposit is $24 smaller.

The claim

This market is being used more like a payment rail and less like a trading venue, and the shift is visible in the shape of the numbers rather than in the headline.

A trading market grows by ticket size: the same people move more money per transaction when they are taking positions. A payment rail grows by frequency: the same people transact more often, in amounts set by what they are actually paying for.

For three weeks the frequency has risen and the size has fallen. Spenda, at $33 a deposit and 46% of all deposits in the market, is the clearest single case, but it is not the only one — Monica set its own deposit record this week at 37,433, and its average is $122.

Where this could be wrong

Two honest objections.

The mean is a weak statistic here. A few very large tickets moving in or out of a week can shift the average without anything changing for ordinary users. We do not publish a median deposit across the market, and until we do, the average is doing more work in this argument than it should.

Composition, not behaviour. The mix of venues is changing — Jeroid entered the index this week, Daya Pro's large tickets swing the average on their own — so some of this could be which venues are growing rather than how people are using them. The wallet-level series would settle it; the venue-level series cannot.

What survives both objections is the raw count: 168,908 deposits from 53,865 wallets is the highest ratio of activity to participants we have recorded, and that ratio does not depend on the average at all.