Stats › Intraday and market microstructure › Crypto 24/7
Bitcoin around the clock
Bitcoin has no opening bell, no closing auction, no weekend and no settlement holiday. It is the closest thing anybody has to a natural experiment on what a market does when you take the session boundaries away.
The answer is that it builds new ones. Volume in bitcoin is not spread evenly around the clock and never has been, and since the US spot ETFs launched in January 2024 it has pulled harder towards New York weekday hours than at any point in its history. I put this page together because the 24/7 line gets repeated as though it describes when people trade, when it only describes when the venue is open.
One warning before you read a single number. Crypto exchange volume is self reported, and a large share of it is not real. That gets its own section, and it shapes which sources I was willing to use. Eight sources at the bottom, all dated.
The weekend share of bitcoin trading volume fell from a peak of 28% in 2019 to an all-time low of 16% in 2024, against 28.6% which is what two days out of seven would be if volume were flat. In the first quarter of 2024 the single hour from 15:00 to 16:00 New York time carried 6.7% of all bitcoin volume, up from 4.5% a quarter earlier, against 4.2% for an evenly spread day. By late May 2024, 46% of the year's cumulative volume had traded in US hours. And the number underneath all of this is unreliable: an NBER paper puts wash trading at 77.5% of reported volume on unregulated exchanges, and Bitwise told the SEC in 2019 that 95% of reported spot volume was fake.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 8 named sources, roughly 2450 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.