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According to numbers shared by industry data provider CCData, transaction volume on the bitcoin network has rocketed since the arrival of Ordinals. “Ordinals are to the bitcoin blockchain what bitcoin ETFs are to bitcoin the cryptocurrency,” said CCData researcher Jacob Joseph.

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Since the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the ETFs, average daily returns for bitcoin outside US trading hours are 0.31 per cent. That stacks up against 0.13 per cent in the six and a half hours that the US stock market is open, according to CCData. Cumulative average daily returns while Wall Street is closed come to 26.4 per cent, against 9.9 per cent during US trading hours, CCData said.

Markets also tend to be more choppy when the US has clocked off. CCData found that the average 30-day rolling annualised volatility during non-US trading hours is just over 40 per cent, compared with an average of 36 per cent in US hours.

The combined volume of crypto spot and derivatives trading on centralized exchanges almost doubled to an all-time high of $9.1 trillion in March while Bitcoin reached a record, according to a CCData.

Spot trading outpaced the gains seen in derivatives, with volume rising 108% to $2.94 trillion, the highest monthly figure since May 2021, CCData’s March Exchange review report said.

Crypto derivatives trading became bigger than ever in March, but its share in the total market activity declined for the sixth consecutive month, according to London-based digital assets data provider CCData.

“The bitcoin halving event is widely regarded as a significant catalyst for positive price action in the bitcoin market,” says Alissa Ostrove, chief of staff at CCData, “where the reduction in supply, assuming demand remains constant or increases, can lead to a rise in the price of bitcoin.”

Solana’s decentralized exchanges “have experienced a dramatic increase in volume over the past few weeks,” said Jacob Joseph, a research analyst at researcher CCData. “Moreover, Solana has witnessed a surge in retail activity, with user activity on the blockchain surpassing that of Ethereum. Specifically, over the past few days, leading Solana DEXs have, collectively, outperformed top Ethereum DEXs like Uniswap, partly due to the ongoing memecoin frenzy.”

Joshua de Vos, research lead at CCData, looked at the 30-day rolling annualized volatility of the cryptocurrency and the S&P 500 index going back to 2010, calculating a ratio for each year. While this figure has decreased, bitcoin was roughly 3.3 times more volatile than the S&P 500 over the last few years (2022, 2023 and the start of 2024).

Demand for bitcoin coming from ETFs but trading the coin itself takes places on crypto exchanges. Bybit, an Asian exchange whose base is hard to pin down, has become the second-largest venue, behind Binance and ahead of Coinbase and OKX. Last month it traded $95.7bn, a record high, according to CCData.

But despite bitcoin’s latest surge, liquidity is yet to return for the crypto industry’s most well-known token. According to numbers shared by data provider CCData, liquidity on the top 21 centralised exchanges still lags well behind levels registered this time last year.

London-based LMAX and Chicago’s Cboe Global Markets recorded trading volume increases of 180 per cent and 130 per cent respectively last month, according to CCData.

And oddly, the influx of ETF money hasn’t improved liquidity on the market. It’s a key sign of its health — the deeper a market, the easier it is to do big deals without disturbing the underlying price. Yet liquidity on the top 21 centralised exchanges is dormant. CCData numbers show that the aggregate bitcoin liquidity on these platforms has not seen any notable uptick since the start of the year, and still remains far below the levels registered at the start of 2023.