May 3, 2013 This article is more than 2 years old.

blockchain.info Volume of bitcoins exchanged, all markets.

In April, $1 billion worth of bitcoins was traded across all exchanges, according to an aside in the complaint bitcoin startup Coinlab just filed against the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox. Just a month prior, only $60 million in bitcoin was traded, estimates Jeremy Liew, a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Look at the graph above, which plots data from the bitcoin blockchain itself, which means it’s a direct measure of trade volume and not an estimate: trade volume goes absolutely nuts in April. And in the first three days of May? The story remains unchanged.

Clearly, some very big players are exchanging huge amounts of bitcoin—on a scale never before seen in the history of this virtual currency.

Of course, $1 billion in exchanges over an entire month, or about $33 million a day, is still a drop in the bucked compared to the global currency market, which may have peaked at $5 trillion a day in September 2012.