Wall Street’s trading desks offer a glimmer of hope for the floundering cryptocurrency market.
Buying pressure has increased at many of the so-called over-the-counter trading desks across the crypto world. The bullish sentiment mimics recent price action across the spot exchange market for crypto and is a sharp reversal from the environment at the end of 2018, numerous trading firms said.
One of the largest over-the-counter trading firms in crypto, Cumberland, tweeted Tuesday that the imbalance between buyers and sellers spiked by 60% over the last week. “Historically, our OTC trading is relatively balanced between buyers and sellers,” the firm said. “Over the last week, our OTC buy/sell ratio (by notional value) has increased approximately 60% towards counterparties buying.” Again, Cumberland isn’t alone.
“As the year turned, the selling pressure from such activities has subsided, and we have seen more buy-side interest pick up,” he added.
OTC desks oversee billions of dollars worth of institutional crypto trading on a daily basis. And in some respects, OTC trading paints a better picture of where the crypto market is from an institutional perspective as that’s where the largest trades are executed. As Monica Summerville, director of fintech research at capital markets consultancy Tabb Group noted in Forbes, “The big deals have to go OTC. A lot of the exchanges limit the order size, so you have to break up your orders, and that’s just fatal.” Summerville estimates that the OTC market is approximately two to three times larger than the trading activity across retail exchanges, including Kraken, Coinbase, and Binance.
Elsewhere, Galaxy Digital also says the tide has turned. “Galaxy’s trading desk saw robust tax-driven trading activity into year-end from asset manager and treasury accounts,” the firm said in a statement. “In early January, much of the flow reversed to buy back previously sold assets. Additionally, we have seen increased buying from Asia and EMEA traders, while some active sellers took a pause to start the year.” It’s a similar story at New York-based Paxos.
The firm, which operates both an OTC desk and an exchange, reports bullish trading activity in January.
“The nature of most of our trading flow so far this year has been buy tickets from emerging market traders,” said Paul Ciavardini, head of OTC trading at Paxos.
Still, there’s always one outlier. DV Chain CEO Garrett See said that his firm hasn’t seen a material difference between activity this month and the end of 2018.
“In January, it’s a pretty even between buyers and sellers, with marginally more buys than sells, but not materially more,” he said.
This post has been update to include a statement from Circle and Paxos.