Last week Bitmex, the Seychelles-based bitcoin exchange, claimed 24-hour trading volumes in excess of 1 million BTC – a new record.

Arthur Hayes, Bitmex’s CEO, tweeted:

‘A new BitMEX (and industry) record: 1,000,000 XBT (> $8BN) traded in the last 24 hours!’

$8 billion truly is an immense figure. Some members of the crypto community are skeptical of how reliable Bitmex’s figures are, and on a broader note it’s not unknown for exchanges to inflate their volumes with wash trading, to make it look like they’re more popular than they really are. However, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and take their statement at face value.

This is pretty remarkable given the state of the market, and the fact that Bitmex isn’t even open to US investors – it caters to the Northern Asian region. Bitcoin has experienced a change in fortunes over the last month, sure, but we’re nowhere near the frenzy of 2017 (yet). Bitmex attribute their record-breaking volumes to the ever-more-complex nature of the bitcoin market, plus ‘capacity increases accomplished by scaling our engine architecture’.

Hayes is becoming a more vocal and influential voice in the crypto space. He has recently gone on record saying that bitcoin hasn’t yet bottomed out, calling for $5,000 before the trend finally changes – and BTC soars to $50,000 by the end of the year. That was a month ago, but a lot has changed since then.

The take-home point from all this is precisely the one that Hayes made: if this is the interest bitcoin is now getting at $8,000, just wait when it’s trading at $10,000 again – and beyond.

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