Bitcoin is trading at just over $150 higher than its corresponding price on the same date last year. On the other hand, trading volume for Bitcoin for October of 2018 sits at 38% lower than that of October 2017, and 87% lower than its peak in January of 2018.
It is another sign that the crypto markets are stabilising, and that the source of that stability may be a reduction in speculative trading and a growing interest in crypto from traditional finance.
These are the conclusions of Diar’s latest weekly report on the state of play within the Crypto markets, and one which also observes that institutional investment has been picking up the slack where retail interest continues to tail off.
The same report also notes that this phenomenon is being spearheaded, in part at least, by an expansion of institutional services at Coinbase which is fast becoming the single most important point of entry for traditional finance into the crypto markets.
“What is quite telling are the ‘remittance’ geared cryptocurrencies, Stellar and XRP which remain the most volatile,” the report also notes. The observation suggests that both XLM and XRP are now the two cryptocurrencies currently attracting the strongest interest from speculative retail traders.
The combined market capitalisation of crypto markets sits at just over $202 billion USD at the time of writing, representing an increase of $25 billion USD over the last twelve months.
Over that same period, ICOs have collectively accumulated over $12 billion USD between them, although this figure will account for a smaller fraction of the overall increase in the total market value of cryptos given the general depreciation in value of ICO tokens over the course of 2018.
