[JudasSicarius]

"In practice, a lot of the transaction action happens inside the individual exchanges, not on the blockchain itself - so we already have a "level 1" and "level 2" system."

Can you expand on this a bit? Is it somewhat analogous to the role that dark pools play in the stock market?

[davidgerard]

By quantity a hell of a lot more individual trades happen on the exchanges than on chain. It's not hidden - just not as radically transparent as on-chain transactions. But obviously harder to gather data on, has none of the blockchain's cryptographic guarantees, etc. It turns out the actual traders care more about getting a good price than the ideological basis for the blockchain. And that's even in a situation where you can't really trust the exchanges - rife with insider trading, wash trades, front running, spoofing, whether a Tether can be counted as a dollar, etc., things that are highly illegal in normal security trading. As long as the number keeps going up, everyone seems okay with this.