Bitcoin Dumps as Bakkt Volume Pumps, Coincidence?

The Bakkt platform is having another good day of trading. The much-hyped Bitcoin futures contracts that disappointed many on first launch has hit another all-time high in daily trading volume, well before its close.

Bakkt trading volume is surging whilst Bitcoin has made a considerable move down in price. The price of the number one digital asset has lost almost 4.3 percent over the last 24 hours.

Institutional Interest in Bitcoin Booming, or do Traders Just Love Volatility?

After a dismal start, trading volumes of Bakkt’s physically-settled daily Bitcoin futures have been picking up of late. Already today, with a lot more trading remaining in the session, the platform has set another all-time high in volume.

With around only half of the daily session completed, 1,282 Bitcoin futures contracts, representing $11,220,705, have been traded so far. The previous all-time high saw $10.3 million traded on October 25. November 5 saw another bumper trading day at the ICE backed platform, with around $10 million volume reported.

https://twitter.com/BakktBot/status/1192879877562781702

Of course, given the expectations of many and the daily trading volumes of established cryptocurrency exchanges, these figures are still relatively low. However, when the platform launched, there wasn’t a single daily session on which more than $2 million worth of contracts were traded. The figures reported recently have been consistently higher.

Many people had expected Bakkt’s launch to be more dramatic than it was. Tales of growing institutional demand, fuelled by successive delays to its actual launch, created such hype that anything short of multi-billion-dollar opening day and an immediate doubling of the Bitcoin price would still likely have disappointed the most optimistic. When it finally went live, neither of these things happened, of course.

Interestingly, what is already Bakkt’s most successful trading session occurred on a day that saw Bitcoin’s price move dramatically downwards. Another large trading day for back, October 25, occurred after a large move to the upside. The spikes in interest on these days seem unlikely to be coincidental.

Given that Bakkt is still so new and many of the accredited investors it allows to trade its futures contracts are still averse to trading Bitcoin for one reason or another, it figures that those that do trade there will be, for lack of a better phrase, action junkies.

The kinds of traders Bakkt welcomes have no shortage of options when it comes to splashing their cash around in traditional markets. Yet, they decided to enter the most volatile market on the planet. Why? Because the kind of volatility that sees an asset lose 4.3 percent as Bitcoin has today, or 20 percent, as it has on previous days, excites them. It, therefore, seems likely that Bakkt volume will continue to surge during the more volatile days for the Bitcoin market.

Related Reading: Bakkt Launching New Bitcoin Options for its Futures Contracts in “Industry First”

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