On Wednesday, April 29th, a major spate of buy pressure pushed the bitcoin price toward $9,000, and top cryptoeconomy exchanges saw an acute explosion of activity accordingly.
At the time of writing, BTC was hovering between $8,800 and $8,900 for an intraday gain of approximately 15%. The price run comes as the Bitcoin blockchain’s highly-anticipated block reward “halving” event is now less than two weeks away.
The top cryptocurrency’s rally also notably follows bitcoin’s drop below $5,000 during last month’s March 12th “Black Thursday” sell-offs. The mood around crypto markets have veered bullish since then, and now top industry powerhouses like Binance and Coinbase are contending with a major demand surge.
Binance Sets New Daily Volume Record
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Crypto exchange giant Binance didn’t earn the title of “giant” without having first made major operational advancements and achieving multiple significant milestones. That’s why the company’s unprecedented trading volume surge on April 29th is no small feat.
Amid the intraday cryptoeconomy rally, Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao took to Twitter to highlight that the popular exchange saw its total daily trading volume rise decisively beyond $11 billion on the day, a new all-time high record for the platform.
ATH in trading volume on @Binance, $11 billion in 24 hrs. https://t.co/lx27tfP8Db
— CZ Binance 🔶🔶🔶 (@cz_binance) April 29, 2020
In the hours after Zhao’s tweet, Binance’s daily trading volume mark rose past $12 billion, setting yet another milestone. In additional comments, the exchange’s CEO said the last time Binance had fielded such impressive daily volume was back in January 2018, when the cryptoeconomy was at its biggest peak yet.
“We have seen ATH in trader numbers for a while, but volume wise, today is a new record,” Zhao said.
Coinbase Faces Outages
San Francisco-based Coinbase is America’s leading crypto exchange, and as such, it’s been prone to massive, acute influxes of U.S. users causing outages on high volume days, and April 29th proved to be no exception in this regard.
Coinbase app is crashing. 2017 vibes pic.twitter.com/SJ4jGFJ5Ua
— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) April 29, 2020
Indeed, on Wednesday as American traders FOMO’d into top cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, The Coinbase.com & Coinbase Pro websites and the exchange’s associated mobile apps faced temporary outages. Within hours of the connectivity issues beginning, the company implemented fixes, explaining:
“We continue to monitor and will be running a full retrospective to ensure the root cause is fully addressed. This issue only affected customers’ ability to access Coinbase and Coinbase Pro UIs, and did not impact trading via our APIs or the health of the underlying markets.”
In the very least, the temporary downtime shows that demand for trading boomed on one of the biggest crypto exchange’s in the world. The grand question for now is whether the buy pressure will end up being a one-off blip or if the cryptoeconomy will continue churning bullishly for the foreseeable future.
Bitcoin Now Showing Up Major Stock Index
Since Black Thursday, much has been said in the way of comparing the bitcoin price’s performance with that of the S&P 500, one of Wall Street’s top indexes.
For example, last month trading around bitcoin briefly achieved newfound levels of correlation with trading around the S&P 500. That reality suggested traders were trading risk-on assets like equities and crypto in similar fashion.
That’s not necessarily surprising, but what is surprising is that the bitcoin price has now performed better than the S&P 500 since February 20th, when the U.S. stock market saw its last top. The major index is down to the tune of -14% since then, whereas bitcoin is down by nearly -13.9% in the same span.
The thought of bitcoin serving as a better store of value than the S&P 500 during major global economic turmoil, even if just briefly, is unfathomable for some. Yet here we are. These are unprecedented times, so there’s plenty of room for the typically unfathomable to occur.
