24h Trading Volume

What this measures

This chart adds up the dollar value of bitcoin traded on the spot market over 24 hours, across all exchanges tracked by CoinGecko. Shown in billions of dollars, it covers the past 12 months. Derivatives markets such as futures are not meant to be included, nor are over-the-counter deals between institutions or trading in ETF shares.

Reported, not verified

This volume relies on figures published by the exchanges themselves. None is required to have them audited, and some have long had an incentive to inflate them to climb the rankings. In 2019, a study presented by asset manager Bitwise to the SEC, the US securities regulator, concluded that around 95% of the volume reported on the exchanges it examined was fake or non-economic. The most common technique has a name, wash trading: an exchange or a trader buys from and sells to itself to simulate activity.

Aggregators have refined their methods since then (CoinGecko, for instance, assigns trust scores to exchanges), but the total remains an estimate. Other biases are less obvious. An exchange that scraps its fees sees its volume jump mechanically, as Binance did on several BTC pairs from July 2022. And because volume is expressed in dollars, it rises with the price even if the number of bitcoin changing hands stays the same.

Spikes still carry information. They almost always accompany sharp price moves, when part of the market rushes to sell or to buy.

A market that plays out off-chain

A trade on an exchange does not create a Bitcoin transaction. The coins stay in the exchange’s wallets, tracked by the exchange balances chart, and only internal balances change. This chart therefore measures the activity of intermediaries, not use of the network, which is better read in on-chain daily transactions.

It is also almost entirely KYC volume. Every purchase is tied to an identity, and in Europe the DAC8 directive now requires service providers to pass that data on to tax authorities.

🪙 Bull Bitcoin drags DAC8 before the Conseil d’État to have it canceled and draws a line in the sand

Peer-to-peer trades, in cash or through non-custodial tools, largely escape this chart. No one can measure their weight with any precision.

The volume that is easiest to count is also the most surveilled. The trading that escapes the statistics is often the kind that best protects the privacy of the people involved.