Cancel your weekends! Bitcoin doesn’t rest, and neither can you By

By Tom Wilson and Anna Irrera

LONDON (Reuters) – doesn’t sleep.

On the first sluggish Saturday of 2021, Jan. 2, many people were still nursing New Year hangovers. But there was no breather for bitcoin, which powered past $30,000 for the first time.

Its 10% single-day jump was one of several weekend and public holiday price surges that helped the cryptocurrency soar by two-thirds from the start of December to early January. 

Trading volumes across six major cryptocurrency exchanges have been 10% higher at weekends than weekdays in that period, data from researcher CryptoCompare shows. That represents a major shift from the previous 11 months, when weekend volumes were 13% lower than traditional trading hours.

The wild weekends are posing new challenges for market players large and small who face having to staff desks outside traditional office hours or risk missing potentially lucrative, or damaging, price moves.

So what’s caused the change?

The increasing activity of bigger U.S. investors like hedge funds in the market, which has driven the bitcoin rally, and specifically their use of trading algorithms, according to interviews with over half a dozen cryptocurrency brokers and traders.

Investors use algorithms, or algos, to buy and sell bitcoin in smaller chunks that won’t move prices so much. The technique was used by U.S. software firm MicroStrategy Inc to buy bitcoin worth $425 million, crypto exchange Coinbase, which was in charge of executing the trade, said in a December blog https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-helping-corporate-companies-diversify-with-crypto-444e8d91ebca.

“In the past, trading activity has operated on the basis of traders buying a specific amount at a certain moment, which is more common on weekdays,” said Blair Halliday, UK head of New York exchange Gemini.

“The amounts being purchased at this point are too large, so these trades are bleeding into the weekends.”

But the technique can trigger outsized price swings at weekends, when liquidity tends to be thinner – in short, fewer bitcoin are on the market at any given price, even if trading volumes are still high. Manual traders and other algos following moves further amplify volatility.

Spreads between bid and ask prices at major crypto exchanges widened over the Christmas holidays, indicating thinner liquidity, according to U.S. researcher Coin Metrics. Volatility jumped, too.

(Graphic: Bitcoin’s wild weekends: https://graphics.reuters.com/CRYPTO-CURRENCIES/azgpoyobnpd/chart.png)

FUNDS HUNT VOLATILITY

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