Bitcoin futures grew up to $20 billion-plus across several cryptocurrency and traditional exchanges

By Selena On Jan 10, 2020

Since its inception in 2017 and making the cryptocurrency market a top performer, Bitcoin futures have become more and more popular. After more than two years of operation, Bitcoin futures had significant growth of up to $ 20 billion traded across several cryptocurrency and traditional exchanges yesterday.

Serious bitcoin futures volumes yesterday – $20bln+ on our radar (not an exhaustive count) pic.twitter.com/6kCSFRq6cy

— skew (@skewdotcom) January 9, 2020

A year for Bitcoin futures?

According to Skew, the daily trading volume of Bitcoin futures on 12 popular exchanges has increased over the past week. Even yesterday, this volume recorded a peak of more than $ 20 billion.

Source: Skew

Looking at the chart, it can be seen that the majority of transactions stem from OKEx, Huobi, and BitMEX exchanges. In particular, Binance is also commendable after a few days of launching Altcoin futures trading options. For the institutional options, like CME and Bakkt, their activity levels are still small.

While there are only a few days left until 2020, the upward trend in daily volume for future trades seems to suggest that this could be a big year for derivatives. Until 2019, with the arrival of the organization’s services, that interest is overgrowing.

In November 2019, Bakkt, described as a crucial bridge between institutional investors and Bitcoin, showed impressive growth after a slow start. Bakkt broke an all-time high of $ 42.5 million in Bitcoin futures at the end of last year.

Moreover, CME, the world’s largest futures exchange, is continuously updating Bitcoin options on its futures contracts early next week to meet the high level of interest from investors of the surname. CME announced it had applied to double the monthly Bitcoin open position limit to 10,000 BTC in September last year, due to this increased demand.

As mentioned above, not just future Bitcoin is gaining interest. Binance has been opening futures trading – with leverage 75 times – for many of the top 20 Altcoins. Exchanges like StormGain also allow high multiplier transactions on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and XRP.

What does this mean for the Bitcoin market?

With such a large daily volume, it’s possible to see the Bitcoin market maturing. Firstly, there is the institutional injection which is growing. Secondly, the investment in such a new and volatile asset with a rising traditional product may indicate a stronger interest in the cryptocurrency market.

However, some people also feel that derivative trading like this allows for active speculative trading – which could harm the Bitcoin market as a whole. Traders are offered the opportunity to bet on the movement of Bitcoin without much knowledge of the technology or the ecosystem in general.

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