Interestingly, the supply surge has led to a notable uptick in trading volume across various assets. According to data from the crypto analysis platform CCData, trading volume for stablecoins saw a 5.14% increase, reaching $1.09 trillion in February. This marks the highest trading volume for stablecoins on centralized exchanges (CEXs) since December 2021.
Moreover, CCData predicts that March will surpass this figure, with trading volume already hitting a substantial amount by mid-month.
“The bitcoin halving event is widely regarded as a significant catalyst for positive price action in the bitcoin market,” says Alissa Ostrove, chief of staff at CCData, “where the reduction in supply, assuming demand remains constant or increases, can lead to a rise in the price of bitcoin.”
Solana’s decentralized exchanges “have experienced a dramatic increase in volume over the past few weeks,” said Jacob Joseph, a research analyst at researcher CCData. “Moreover, Solana has witnessed a surge in retail activity, with user activity on the blockchain surpassing that of Ethereum. Specifically, over the past few days, leading Solana DEXs have, collectively, outperformed top Ethereum DEXs like Uniswap, partly due to the ongoing memecoin frenzy.”
Joshua de Vos, research lead at CCData, looked at the 30-day rolling annualized volatility of the cryptocurrency and the S&P 500 index going back to 2010, calculating a ratio for each year. While this figure has decreased, bitcoin was roughly 3.3 times more volatile than the S&P 500 over the last few years (2022, 2023 and the start of 2024).
Demand for bitcoin coming from ETFs but trading the coin itself takes places on crypto exchanges. Bybit, an Asian exchange whose base is hard to pin down, has become the second-largest venue, behind Binance and ahead of Coinbase and OKX. Last month it traded $95.7bn, a record high, according to CCData.
But despite bitcoin’s latest surge, liquidity is yet to return for the crypto industry’s most well-known token. According to numbers shared by data provider CCData, liquidity on the top 21 centralised exchanges still lags well behind levels registered this time last year.
London-based LMAX and Chicago’s Cboe Global Markets recorded trading volume increases of 180 per cent and 130 per cent respectively last month, according to CCData.
And oddly, the influx of ETF money hasn’t improved liquidity on the market. It’s a key sign of its health — the deeper a market, the easier it is to do big deals without disturbing the underlying price. Yet liquidity on the top 21 centralised exchanges is dormant. CCData numbers show that the aggregate bitcoin liquidity on these platforms has not seen any notable uptick since the start of the year, and still remains far below the levels registered at the start of 2023.
Aggregate open interest in Bitcoin derivatives, which can be leveraged up to 100 times, has risen nearly 90% since October on centralized exchanges to reach the highest level since the beginning of 2022, when the last crypto bull run collapsed, per CCData. Crypto exchanges Binance, OKX and Bybit are all seeing a jump in open interest to levels not seen since the peak of 2021 bull market, according to CCData. The loan book at Ledn, which lends out money safeguarded by Bitcoin collateral, has returned to levels last seen before the FTX exchange collapsed in late 2022, said Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of Ledn.
Crypto data firm CCData and CCRI created an institutional-grade scoring system that evaluates digital assets’ ESG characteristics.
The total derivatives trading volume on CME rose 35% in January to $94.9 billion, according to data provided by CCData.
The trading volume for bitcoin futures rose 42% to $73 billion in January. “This comes as institutional traders wound down their positions after the approval of the spot bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETF) in the United States,” said a report by CCData.
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