Bitcoin is slightly up this Friday as a month and a quarter ends with CME futures expiring for March.
The Wall Street exchange now handles around 88,000 bitcoin equivalent transaction volumes a day, worth $2.5 billion.
That’s down from the peak on the 13th of March of 145,000 bitcoin just as the Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate and Signature were going under.
The exchange is now handling considerable volumes and its futures expiry used to affect the bitcoin market on the last Friday of the month.
It appears no more, or not as much, with neither bitcoin nor cryptos more widely paying much attention as BTC tap taps that $29,000 resistance.
One reason for this fall in influence may well be because Wall Street now has a lot more options to trade bitcoin than in 2018 when these futures launched.
There’s COIN for example, of Coinbase, up 1.65%. There’s MSTR, up by about as much. Countless of stock traded bitcoin crypto miners. ETFs and ETNs in Europe and Canada. And of course there are crypto exchanges.
Not to mention brokers like IBKR now offer crypto trading, as do the likes of Fidelity. All these being fairly new developments mostly during 2020-21.
The CME Friday therefore has been replaced with Nasdaq. That’s up 0.5% today as markets finally see some spring.
There’s a big question as to whether cryptos move Nasdaq or Nasdaq moves cryptos, at the edges of course because they don’t quite have a direct relationship.
And that’s because many crypto stocks are part of the Nasdaq index, and so if cryptos fall, the crypto stocks fall, and the index falls too.
Suggesting a decoupling in a general sense might be unlikely because through these crypto stocks there is now a direct relationship, but the crypto part of the index is still fairly small.
Yet potentially enough to move Nasdaq at the edges, creating what may well be an illusion of a correlation when they’re moving as they please, but they’re part of the same index.
Numerous more crypto stocks will hit Nasdaq, even if SEC tries to delay them, though if SEC is too stubborn there’s always Europe.
No company crypto stock trade in Europe yet, though there are some miners as well as actual spot bitcoin ETNs in EtcBTC.
But then by that definition there are no company crypto stocks anywhere, except one: Coinbase.
The relationship between stocks and cryptos therefore will only grow, and with that so too that causative question: is it Nasdaq moving bitcoin, or is it us moving the index.
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- Source: https://www.trustnodes.com/2023/03/31/bitcoin-up-on-futures-expiry-as-stocks-replace-cme
