Bitcoin Traders are increasing their exposure to Bitcoin on futures trading platform BitMEX. The trading pair is fast approaching its all-time high of $1.22 billion. 

BitMEX’s main trading pair – XBT (Bitcoin and USD) has risen by over $250 million in the last 10 days. The pair now has an open-interest of $1.06 Billion. Interestingly, BitMEX has the lion shares of Bitcoin futures trading. Further, futures trading also makes up for 90% of BitMEX’ s daily trading volume.

While Bitcoin continues to soar high, it’s trading volume, unfortunately, doesn’t share the same fate. Larry Cermak, a famous crypto researcher recently revealed how spot trading volume continues to suffer.

He further explained that spot trading volume serves as a lagging indicator of price. This implies that as the prices increase more people start trading and thus the volume goes up. Interestingly, August seems to have a massive discrepancy in the last three years.

If we look at the derivatives volume, the volume on BitMEX, the dominant derivatives exchange, has also witnessed a  decrease from $65 billion in July to less than $52 billion in August. The drastic drop in volume can further be attributed to the CFTC probe.

Considering the case of August, Binance managed to secure 55% of traded volume, whereas Coinbase recorded 14% of the volume. Bitfinex was a close second with 9%. While, Kraken, Bitstamp, and Bitflyer noted 8 percent, 7%, and 3 % respectively.

While the open-interest in BitMEX is enough an indication that traders are willing to risk assets on the future of Bitcoin’s price, there seems to be no clarity over in which way they think the price will move. Over the past 24 hours, considering the volume of “buy” and “sell” the crypto community is slightly in the favor of going up.

It is interesting to note that even Binance is entering the futures trading game, while it allegedly copied BitMEX’s documents, will it have the same success as well?