Bakkt monthly futures volume on Wednesday skyrocketed to 6601 BTC contracts. This figure is 930 contracts more of Bakkt’s previous all-time high of 5671 contracts. The volume surge came as no surprise to the crypto community as the ICE-operated platform has been picking up the pace since being debuted in late-September this year.
The new record also came as bitcoin bounced back from $6,550 lows seen on Dec 18 to over $7,450, which marked a jump of over 13% in a span of hours. The top crypto has, however, experienced a slight pullback to $7,161.05 at press time. All in all, there is a strong reason to believe that institutional interest in bitcoin is increasing.
Frequently Breaking Records
According to a twitter post by Bakkt Volume Bot, Bakkt’s bitcoin futures hit a new all-time high with a daily volume of 6601BTC, which is equivalent to $47.30 million.
At the end of November, Bakkt futures volume hit a record of 5671 contracts ($42.5 million). In other words, Bakkt’s futures have now traded for almost three months and are breaking records every so often despite having had a far from impressive day one volume of only 72 BTC contracts.
More recently, Bakkt launched cash-settled bitcoin futures in Singapore. As of Dec 18, a record of roughly 1000 BTC contracts were traded on Bakkt’s cash-settled futures platform. Also this month, Bakkt launched bitcoin options that are based on their already existing bitcoin futures contracts.
Institutional Interest In Bitcoin Is Rising
It’s not only Bakkt that has been seeing an increase in institutional investors’ interest, but CME bitcoin futures are also witnessing some institutional investor love. Late last month, bitcoin futures volume on CME smashed a record of around 11,750 BTC contracts. The contracts rose to over 13,130 contracts in under a month. Since being launched two years ago, at least 2.5 million BTC contracts have been traded on CME to date.
The growing volumes on Bakkt and CME suggest a noticeable trend in the bitcoin market: bitcoin is increasingly gaining interest from institutional investors. With Fidelity Investments expanding its services to Europeans, we can expect more institutional investors to dip their toes in the cryptocurrency space in the near future.
