Bitcoin Trade Volume On Coinbase Reaches 14-Month High

U.S. based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has hit the highest trading volumes seen in 14 months in May. According to data from Bitcoinity, Coinbase facilitated the trade of 738,959.42 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at an estimated $5.9 billion at current market prices.

These numbers are the platform’s highest recorded volume for trading Bitcoin since March 2018. It also makes the month of May the 6th most voluminous month for Bitcoin trade, in the history of Coinbase till date. The most bitcoin ever traded in a month on Coinbase was during Bitcoin’s all-time high in December of 2017, when the cryptocurrency reached peaked at approximately $19,891 and 1,275,295.522 BTC traded the cryptocurrency on the platform.

The volumes traded in May make up nearly 60 percent of the amount recorded during the bullish period in December 2017. It would have been more if not for the difference in price, which is roughly 60 percent lower than its all-time high price from two years ago.

What makes Coinbase’s volume upsurge particularly interesting is the gap in trading that the exchange announced earlier this year.

In the update, the exchange noted:

“A recurring issue with one of our processes is causing Bitcoin buys and sells to become temporarily unavailable. Our team is investigating and working to restore full service as soon as possible. Coinbase customers may experience intermittent outages of BTC buys and sells over the duration as we resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Although in recent times, cryptocurrency exchanges have been known to inflate their numbers, Coinbase is one of the trustworthy few that stays true to its coin. In an investigation conducted to look into reportage of bitcoin trading volumes by CoinMarketCap in March, Bitwise Asset Management revealed that roughly 95% of the reported numbers are fake.

Tim Enneking, managing director of Digital Capital Management, however, noted that “most of the largest exchanges appear to have a much lower level of ‘fake’ volume, so the 95% number is hardly evenly spread across exchanges.”

According to Enneking, the dubious number manipulations are done in a bid to attract more traders and stake a firm bid in the fast-growing digital currency exchange sector.

“Other than simply wanting to make volume appear larger than it is for commercial reasons (the greater the volume, the easier it is to attract even more traders), three other factors may play into the motivations behind exaggerating volume: (1) the generalized decline in volume over the last 12 months or so, which makes appearing to be larger both more important and more difficult, (2) the growing volume on OTC platforms, which both exacerbates and accelerates the first problem, and (3) the seemingly endless proliferation of new exchanges, meaning that more players are fighting for larger pieces of a shrinking pie”.

Admirably, Coinbase was part of the 10 industry heavyweights listed as uninvolved in the fake volume inflation.