Technology

Bitcoin is up 12% this month — even though barely anybody is trading it

Published

2 years ago

June 26, 2023

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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.

FTX's collapse is shaking crypto to its core. The pain may not be over

“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.”

WATCH: Can ethereum topple bitcoin as the crypto king?

Technology

CNBC Daily Open: Some hope after last week’s U.S. market rout

Published

6 hours ago

November 24, 2025

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CNBC Daily Open: Some hope after last week's U.S. market rout

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Nov. 21, 2025 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Last week on Wall Street, two forces dragged stocks lower: a set of high-stakes numbers from Nvidia and the U.S. jobs report that landed with more heat than expected. But the leaves that remained after hot tea scalded investors seemed to augur good tidings.

Even though Nvidia’s third-quarter results easily breezed past Wall Street’s estimates, they couldn’t quell worries about lofty valuations and an unsustainable bubble inflating in the artificial intelligence sector. The “Magnificent Seven” cohort — save Alphabet — had a losing week.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics added to the pressure. September payrolls rose far more than economists expected, prompting investors to pare back their bets of a December interest rate cut. The timing didn’t help matters, as the report had been delayed and hit just as markets were already on edge.

By Friday’s close, the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average lost roughly 2% for the week, while the Nasdaq Composite tumbled 2.7%.

Still, a flicker of hope appeared on the horizon.

On Friday, New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said that he sees “room” for the central bank to lower interest rates, describing current policy as “modestly restrictive.” His comments caused traders to increase their bets on a December cut to around 70%, up from 44.4% a week ago, according to the CME FedWatch tool.

And despite a broad sell-off in AI stocks last week, Alphabet shares bucked the trend. Investors seemed impressed by its new AI model, Gemini 3, and hopeful that its development of custom chips could rival Nvidia’s in the long run.

Meanwhile, Eli Lilly’s ascent into the $1 trillion valuation club served as a reminder that market leadership doesn’t belong to tech alone. In a market defined by narrow concentration, any sign of broadening strength is a welcome change.

Diversification, even within AI’s sprawling ecosystem, might be exactly what this market needs now.

What you need to know today

And finally…

The Beijing music venue DDC was one of the latest to have to cancel a performance by a Japanese artist on Nov. 20, 2025, in the wake of escalating bilateral tensions.

Screenshot

Japanese concerts in China are getting abruptly canceled as tensions simmer

China’s escalating dispute with Japan reinforces Beijing’s growing economic influence — and penchant for abrupt actions that can create uncertainty for businesses.

Hours before Japanese jazz quintet The Blend was due to perform in Beijing on Thursday, a plainclothesman walked into the DDC music club during a sound check. Then, “the owner of the live house came to me and said: ‘The police has told me tonight is canceled,'” said Christian Petersen-Clausen, a music agent.

— Evelyn Cheng

Correction: This report has been updated to correct the spelling of Eli Lilly.

Technology

Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges

Published

6 hours ago

November 24, 2025

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Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed that people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to a legal filing that was released on Friday.

The social media giant was alleged to have initiated the study, dubbed Project Mercury, in late 2019 as a way to help it “explore the impact that our apps have on polarization, news consumption, well-being, and daily social interactions,” according to the legal brief, filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

The filing contains newly unredacted information pertaining to Meta.

The newly released legal brief is related to high-profile multidistrict litigation from a variety of plaintiffs, such as school districts, parents and state attorneys general against social media companies like Meta, Google’s YouTube, Snap and TikTok.

The plaintiffs claim that these businesses were aware that their respective platforms caused various mental health-related harms to children and young adults, but failed to take action and instead misled educators and authorities, among several allegations.

“We strongly disagree with these allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement. “The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens—like introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens’ experiences.”

A Google spokesperson said in a statement that “These lawsuits fundamentally misunderstand how YouTube works and the allegations are simply not true.”

“YouTube is a streaming service where people come to watch everything from live sports to podcasts to their favorite creators, primarily on TV screens, not a social network where people go to catch up with friends,” the Google spokesperson said. “We’ve also developed dedicated tools for young people, guided by child safety experts, that give families control.”

Snap and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 2019 Meta research was based on a random sample of consumers who stopped their Facebook and Instagram usage for a month, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit alleged that Meta was disappointed that the initial tests of the study showed that people who stopped using Facebook “for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.”

Meta allegedly chose not to “sound the alarm,” but instead stopped the research, the lawsuit said.

“The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study,” according to the suit. “Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.”

The lawsuit cites an unnamed Meta employee who allegedly said, “If the results are bad and we don’t publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?”

Stone, in a series of social media posts, pushed back on the lawsuit’s implication that Meta shuttered the internal research after it allegedly showed a causal relationship between its apps and adverse mental-health effects.

Stone characterized the 2019 study as flawed and said it was the reason that the company expressed disappointment. The study, Stone said, merely found that “people who believed using Facebook was bad for them felt better when they stopped using it.”

“This is a confirmation of other public research (“deactivation studies”) out there that demonstrates the same effect,” Stone said in a separate post. “It makes intuitive sense but it doesn’t show anything about the actual effect of using the platform.”

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed reporting.

WATCH: Final trades: Meta, S&P Global and Idexx Lab.