Bitcoin and Ethereum see gains as CME volumes soar, while miner sales and outages hit crypto market
DATA from CryptoCompare shows that the price of Bitcoin moved upward throughout the past week, surging from around $43,200 to a high above the $48,000 mark before enduring a slight correction and dropping to $47,850 today.
Ethereum’s Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, moved in a similar way, starting the week with a rise $2,300 to a high above the $2,500 mark, before a slight correction saw ETH drop to $2,485.
Headlines in the cryptocurrency space this week focused on Bitcoin’s current price action, with Bitfinex analysts noting that while the newly launched spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States have been attracting a lot of attention, prices had remained suppressed by miners selling their BTC holdings.
According to CryptoQuant data, after the launch of these ETFs, miners moved around $1 billion worth of BTC to exchanges, taking advantage of the price spike that came in anticipation of their launch. While these moves initially dampened price rises, BTC is nevertheless on track for its longest winning streak in a year as it nears the $50,000 mark, and spot ETFs netted $2.8 billion in new investments.
CCData’s latest Exchange Review has revealed that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) recorded a 35% jump in trading volumes that reached the highest level since October 2021 after reaching $94.9 billion.
The data also shows that Bitcoin futures’ trading volumes rose 42% to $73 billion in January, as institutional traders adjusted their positions based on the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US.
Bitcoin options on CME also plunged almost 30% to $1.57 billion. Meanwhile, Ether futures on the platform saw a 15.6% increase in trading volume in January, as investors await the SEC’s decision on spot Ether ETFs
Despite these rises, cryptocurrency platform and payments app Bakkt, which launched in 2019 with backing from the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, raises concerns about its financial viability this week.
JPMorgan survey finds most institutional traders are not interested in crypto
According to a recent JPMorgan survey of more than 4,000 institutional traders, 78% of them have no intention to trade digital assets in the next five years.
The e-trading annual survey also showed that only a few traders consider blockchain technology as the key driver of future trading, while most of them (61%) think that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will have the biggest impact on trading in the next three years.
AI and machine learning have risen in popularity, from 25% of traders two years ago to 61% this year, while blockchain technology has fallen from 25% to 7%. However, there is still some interest in the sector, as 9% of traders are currently trading crypto, up from 8% last year, and 12% of them plan to do so in the next five years.
Meanwhile, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved new rules that placed cryptocurrency liquidity providers into federal oversight, through the approval of rules targeting entities with significant roles in providing market liquidity.
Solana network restarted after five-hour outage
This past week, the Solana network experienced a significant outage that saw it go offline for around five hours before validators were able to restart it and resume block production. This was the network’s first major outage since February 2023, when it was down for several hours.
The outage effectively halted block production on the high-performance blockchain, stopping transactions from going through on it. It came after a year in which Solana’s price outperformed the wider cryptocurrency market while recovering from the collapse of FTX, whose founder was a major supporter of the network.
Meanwhile, Ethereum has seen developers scheduled to launch the Dencun upgrade on its mainnet on March 13. The upgrade includes the introduction of proto-danksharding and blobs, aiming to significantly reduce transaction costs on layer-2 networks.
The upgrade was scheduled on the mainnet just a day after it was successfully implemented on the Holesky testnet without any hiccups. Through it, Ethereum will introduce proto-danksharding and implement “blob-carrying transactions” to allow layer-2 networks to use more Ethereum block space.
The move is set to significantly reduce transaction fees and help Ethereum scale.
Francisco Memoria is a content creator at CryptoCompare who’s in love with technology and focuses on helping people see the value digital currencies have. His work has been published in numerous reputable industry publications. Francisco holds various cryptocurrencies.
