In the first 30 days of 2020, Bitcoin exhibited a 29% growth in price. Undoubtedly, we have seen better days, yet, the result is still encouraging. More so, since it’s a rare occurrence for Bitcoin price to go up in Q1. And this unusual performance is significantly spiking the institutional interest in Bitcoin.
As per the data compiled by Skew, the aggregated daily volumes of Bitcoin futures have been growing consistently for the last 4 days. When we took a closer look at the data shared by Skew, the total BTC futures trading volumes seem to have doubled between the 25th to the 28th of January.
Futures volumes have been rising for four consecutive days as bitcoin approaches the $10k mark pic.twitter.com/oMIPTWj5Mg
— skew (@skewdotcom) January 29, 2020
In the second week of January, BTC futures contract trading already recorded the busiest day of 2020. Thus, almost $25 billion BTC futures were traded on the 14th of January. This occurred in the light of CME BTC options launch.
OKEx, Huobi, and BitMEX remain the highest contributors to BTC futures trading.
Beyond Bitcoin
The Ethereum Options trading activity has also picked up in January 2020. After staying close to the minimum volumes of $181k during Q4 of 2019, the activity soared to $7.3 million on the 14th of January.
ETH options trading activity has picked up since the start of the year pic.twitter.com/Ckkrua5mE6
— skew (@skewdotcom) January 29, 2020
Meanwhile, Bakkt is sleeping
Bakkt proved to be a disappointment since the beginning. It was supposed to play a pivotal role in attracting institutional attention to BTC. But it seems to have failed miserably. In the last 10 days, not a single BTC futures contract has been traded on Bakkt. And it is a piece of very bad news for its liquidity pool.
It's been 10 days since the last option trade on Bakkt 💤 pic.twitter.com/1xYiylC8fr
— skew (@skewdotcom) January 28, 2020
CME forges ahead
In the initial days of 2020, the BTC futures listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange also doubled. And since then has been keeping up with the market performance. Its recent options on the BTC futures launch on the 13th of January attracted a $2.3 million trading volume.
Why is 31st January 2020 so important?
This Friday, the CME Bitcoin futures expire. To remind, this key event has often acted as a short-term price indicator of Bitcoin. All we can do is wait for the BTC futures to expire and see which side the price settles on.
In early December, we covered the launch of Bakkt’s Bitcoin Cash Settled Futures in spite of a lot of critique.
