Bitcoin is up 12% this month — even though barely anybody is trading it
Andriy Onufriyenko | Moment | Getty Images
Bitcoin has rallied sharply this month — but not for reasons you might think.
The world’s largest digital currency has risen more than 12% since the beginning of June. On Wednesday, its price topped $30,000 to hit its highest level since April 14, according to Coin Metrics data.
Market players have attributed the jump to the news that U.S. asset management giant BlackRock had filed for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund tracking the market price of the underlying asset.
While that may be part of the reason, the outsized moved can be put down to another factor beyond the news flow surrounding large institutions taking steps to embrace bitcoin or other digital assets.
Thin liquidity and big players
Crypto “market depth” has been sitting at very low levels this year. Market depth refers to a market’s ability to absorb relatively large buy and sell orders. When market depth is low and big players put in orders to buy or sell digital coins, prices can move in a big way up or down, even if the orders are not that huge.
Market depth is a measure of liquidity in a market.
According to data firm Kaiko, bitcoin’s market depth has fallen 20% since the start of this year. Bitcoin has been one of the hardest-hit cryptocurrencies in terms of market depth, Kaiko said.
The market depth of bitcoin at a 1% range from the mid price has fallen about 20% since the start of the year, according to data firm Kaiko.
Kaiko
“Bitcoin’s recent surge in value has largely been driven by large trades within a less liquid market,” Jamie Sly, head of research at CCData, told CNBC via email.
“Our analysis of market orders over 5 BTC reveals an aggressive surge in market buying, suggesting large players are seeking to gain exposure to digital assets.”
“When combining large orders with thin books, the market is subject to more volatile movements,” Sly added.
That lack of liquidity has in part been driven by the regulatory scrutiny of the crypto industry from U.S. authorities. The Securities and Exchange Commission has sued major exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance.
Low liquidity, which has been a feature of the crypto market all year, is also partly behind bitcoin’s 80% year-to-date rally.
Retail traders aren’t back — yet
Another notable feature of the current crypto market is the low volumes being traded on exchanges.
Daily trading volume in the cryptocurrency currently sits at around $24 billion, according to crypto data website CoinGecko.
That’s down markedly from the more than $100 billion of overall trading volume in bitcoin during the peak of the 2021 crypto rally, when bitcoin rose close to an all-time high of nearly $69,000.
Large crypto investors usually hope that an early surge in prices will be enough to tempt retail investors back into participating in the rally which ultimately boosts prices for bitcoin and other digital coins. But that hasn’t happened.
“What is notable about this rally is that trade volumes overall are at multi-year lows, and we are only seeing a slight increase, which even then is far lower than levels we saw from January to March,” Clara Medalie, director of research at Kaiko, told CNBC.
“I think trading volumes and price volatility are two of the most telling indicators of crypto market activity. Both volatility and volumes are at multi-year lows, and even a rapid increase in price is not enough to draw traders in.”
‘It’s not a market for ordinary clients’
In the last bitcoin cycle, market momentum was largely driven by big, institutional names as investment banks from Morgan Stanley to Goldman Sachs set up trading desks to give their clients exposure to the digital currency.
However, the market really started to break out only when retail traders started to take notice — in early 2021, people became tempted by the phenomenon that was NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, and other more speculative bets.
Later that year, the cryptocurrency market experienced a seismic rally, with the price of bitcoin zooming to unprecedented levels. That was in tandem with surging trading volume, which climbed from $21.2 billion at the start of 2020 to $105.4 billion on Nov. 9, 2021, when bitcoin hits its all-time high, according to CoinGecko.
Today, trading volume is nowhere near where it was at the height of the 2021 crypto boom.
“Any bit of news, if it’s good, then the professional traders trade — otherwise, they’re not trading,” Carol Alexander, a professor of finance at the University of Sussex, told CNBC.
“If a bit of good news like the bitcoin ETF comes, they fire the cannons upwards.”
BlackRock’s ETF filing was followed by similar move from Invesco and WisdomTree, which also filed for their own respective bitcoin-related products.
“Bitcoin and ether are both being manipulated in this way by the professional traders. They don’t trade most of the time, they wait until there’s a bit of good news,” Alexander said.
“Then they’ll sell the top and you’ve got a sideways market.”
Indeed, bitcoin has traded within a range this year, and attempts to burst significantly higher have been thwarted.
Alexander thinks bitcoin is likely to trade within a range of between $25,000 and $30,000 for the remainder of the summer.
She expects, however, that toward the end of the year, the cryptocurrency will climb toward $50,000, citing attempts from larger market players to prop up the market, with big purchases making outsized moves.
“It’s not a market for ordinary clients. It’s really is not,” she warned.
Has the market bottomed?
Vijay Ayyar, vice president of international markets at the Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX, told CNBC he suspects the latest run-up in bitcoin’s price is being driven more by “long term institutional buyers.”
Big funds and crypto-focused hedge funds are among the market participants driving the action, Ayyar added.
“I don’t think this is as much of a retail push, since retail was quite flushed out during the recent pullback,” he said.
Several crypto industry insiders have expressed hopes that the market is nearing a “bottoming” period where it can start to rise again.
The recent price action echoes activity in 2018, when both bitcoin’s price and volumes were subdued for several months before beginning to rise again the following year.
However, CCData’s Sly said it is “still too early to say whether the worst is over for bitcoin.”
“The recent wave of interest from traditional financial institutions, like Blackrock, Citadel, and Fidelity instils a renewed optimism in the market,” he said.
“Provided the wider macro environment and equity markets continue to be favorable, it is possible that bitcoin could maintain its current positive price trajectory.”
The logo for the Food and Drug Administration is seen ahead of a news conference on removing synthetic dyes from America’s food supply, at the Health and Human Services Headquarters in Washington, DC on April 22, 2025.
Nathan Posner | Anadolu | Getty Images
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday published a warning letter addressed to the wrist wearable company Whoop, alleging it is marketing a new blood pressure feature without proper approvals.
The letter centers around Whoop’s Blood Pressure Insights (BPI) feature, which the company introduced alongside its latest hardware launch in May.
Whoop said its BPI feature uses blood pressure information to offer performance and wellness insights that inform consumers and improve athletic performance.
But the FDA said Tuesday that Whoop’s BPI feature is intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent disease — a key distinction that would reclassify the wellness tracker as a “medical device” that has to undergo a rigorous testing and approval processes.
“Providing blood pressure estimation is not a low-risk function,” the FDA said in the letter. “An erroneously low or high blood pressure reading can have significant consequences for the user.”
A Whoop spokesperson said the company’s system offers only a single daily estimated range and midpoint, which distinguishes it from medical blood pressure devices used for diagnosis or management of high blood pressure.
Whoop users who purchase the $359 “Whoop Life” subscription tier can use the BPI feature to get daily insights about their blood pressure, including estimated systolic and diastolic ranges, according to the company.
Whoop also requires users to log three traditional cuff-readings to act as a baseline in order to unlock the BPI feature.
Additionally, the spokesperson said the BPI data is not unlike other wellness metrics that the company deals with. Just as heart rate variability and respiratory rate can have medical uses, the spokesperson said, they are permitted in a wellness context too.
“We believe the agency is overstepping its authority in this case by attempting to regulate a non-medical wellness feature as a medical device,” the Whoop spokesperson said.
High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is the number one risk factor for heart attacks, strokes and other types of cardiovascular disease, according to Dr. Ian Kronish, an internist and co-director of Columbia University’s Hypertension Center.
Kronish told CNBC that wearables like Whoop are a big emerging topic of conversation among hypertension experts, in part because there’s “concern that these devices are not yet proven to be accurate.”
If patients don’t get accurate blood pressure readings, they can’t make informed decisions about the care they need.
At the same time, Kronish said wearables like Whoop present a “big opportunity” for patients to take more control over their health, and that many professionals are excited to work with these tools.
Understandably, it can be confusing for consumers to navigate. Kronish encouraged patients to talk with their doctor about how they should use wearables like Whoop.
“It’s really great to hear that the FDA is getting more involved around informing consumers,” Kronish said.
FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seen in Silver Spring, Maryland November 4, 2009.
Jason Reed | Reuters
Whoop is not the only wearable manufacturer that’s exploring blood pressure monitoring.
Omron and Garmin both offer medical blood pressure monitoring with on-demand readings that fall under FDA regulation. Samsung also offers blood-pressure-reading technology, but it is not available in the U.S. market.
Apple has also been teasing a blood pressure sensor for its watches, but has not been able to deliver. In 2024, the tech giant received FDA approval for its sleep apnea detection feature.
Whoop has previously received FDA clearance for its ECG feature, which is used to record and analyze a heart’s electrical activity to detect potential irregularities in rhythm. But when it comes to blood pressure, Whoop believes the FDA’s perspective is antiquated.
“We do not believe blood pressure should be considered any more or less sensitive than other physiological metrics like heart rate and respiratory rate,” a spokesperson said. “It appears that the FDA’s concerns may stem from outdated assumptions about blood pressure being strictly a clinical domain and inherently associated with a medical diagnosis.”
The FDA said Whoop could be subject to regulatory actions like seizure, injunction, and civil money penalties if it fails to address the violations that the agency identified in its letter.
Whoop has 15 business days to respond with steps the company has taken to address the violations, as well as how it will prevent similar issues from happening again.
“Even accounting for BPI’s disclaimers, they do not change this conclusion, because they are insufficient to outweigh the fact that the product is, by design, intended to provide a blood pressure estimation that is inherently associated with the diagnosis of a disease or condition,” the FDA said.
WATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary
United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the first two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation stands ready for launch on pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on October 5, 2023 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States.
Paul Hennessey | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
As Amazon chases SpaceX in the internet satellite market, the e-commerce and computing giant is now counting on Elon Musk’s rival company to get its next batch of devices into space.
On Wednesday, weather permitting, 24 Kuiper satellites will hitch a ride on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets from a launchpad on Florida’s Space Coast. A 27-minute launch window for the mission, dubbed “KF-01,” opens at 2:18 a.m. ET.
The launch will be livestreamed on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk.
The mission marks an unusual alliance. SpaceX’s Starlink is currently the dominant provider of low earth orbit satellite internet, with a constellation of roughly 8,000 satellites and about 5 million customers worldwide.
Amazon launched Project Kuiper in 2019 with an aim to provide broadband internet from a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company is working under a tight deadline imposed by the Federal Communications Commission that requires it to have about 1,600 satellites in orbit by the end of July 2026.
Amazon’s first two Kuiper launches came in April and June, sending 27 satellites each time aboard rockets supplied by United Launch Alliance.
Assuming Wednesday’s launch is a success, Amazon will have a total of 78 satellites in orbit. In order to meet the FCC’s tight deadline, Amazon needs to rapidly manufacture and deploy satellites, securing a hefty amount of capacity from rocket providers. Kuiper has booked up to 83 launches, including three rides with SpaceX.
Space has emerged as a battleground between Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, two of the world’s richest men. Aside from Kuiper, Bezos also competes with Musk via his rocket company Blue Origin.
Blue Origin in January sent up its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time, which is intended to rival SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets. While Blue Origin currently trails SpaceX, Bezos last year predicted his latest venture will one day be bigger than Amazon, which he started in 1994.
Kuiper has become one of Amazon’s biggest bets, with more than $10 billion earmarked for the project. The company may need to spend as much as $23 billion to build its full constellation, analysts at Bank of America wrote in a note to clients last week. That figure doesn’t include the cost of building terminals, which consumers will use to connect to the service.
The analysts estimate Amazon is spending $150 million per launch this year, while satellite production costs are projected to total $1.1 billion by the fourth quarter.
Amazon is going after a market that’s expected to grow to at least $40 billion by 2030, the analysts wrote, citing estimates by Boston Consulting Group. The firm estimated that Amazon could generate $7.1 billion in sales from Kuiper by 2032 if it claims 30% of the market.
“With Starlink’s solid early growth, our estimates could be conservative,” the analysts wrote.
WATCH: Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites into space
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