CME and Bakkt Bitcoin Futures See Largest Daily Volume in Weeks

Cryptocurrency trading across the board has been depressed in the last few weeks as most pay closer attention to macroeconomic indicators. However, Bitcoin’s recent bullish rise has surprised onlookers—and futures markets are posting higher-than-expected trading volumes.

CME and Bakkt See Trading Volume Spike

Both Bakkt and CME are seeing a drastic increase in trading volume for their Bitcoin futures markets. Both are showing the largest volume increases since March 16, coincidentally. As skew (@skewdotcom) reported recently, the strong showing may be indicating a return of investor interest in Bitcoin after a temporary lull.

CME & Bakkt both with strong showings yesterday, largest volume since Mar 16th. pic.twitter.com/flQLsAqQNM

— skew (@skewdotcom) April 3, 2020

Of course, the uptick in trading volume is not inherently good news for the market—after all, the majority of traders on these exchanges could be betting that the price of BTC will fall. At the time of writing, however, longs are double all shorts across all the major exchanges. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is just under the $7,000 resistance price point.

Macroeconomic Indicators

Although it is easy to get absorbed into the internal market movements of the cryptocurrency market, we must not forget that macroeconomic indicators are still dominant. This is because we are still amid an economic crisis. The uncertainty has caused predictions on Bitcoin’s future price movements to oscillate wildly. For example, one analyst from Morgan Creek Digital believes Bitcoin will drop lower into the halving and hit an all-time-high by September. Others, however, are far more bearish and point to the worsening macroeconomic indicators as proof. In the past week, some 6.6M Americans applied for unemployment benefits. Assuming we are in a recession, it is difficult to predict Bitcoin’s price movements—that’s because the leading cryptocurrency has never experienced one, despite being born from the Great Recession. However, an uptick in trading volume is a positive indicator which should give traders some hope during this bullish upswing.