Interest in crypto futures grows despite Bitcoin's low volatility

Bitcoin price has been unusually calm for nearly two months. Of course, there were still some fluctuations, but they were nowhere near the sizes that are usually associated with the coin. For the most part, BTC went from $9.200 to $9,500 and back, which is next to nothing for a coin that surges and drops by thousands of dollars in a matter of hours when there is activity.

However, despite the unusually low volatility, it appears that open interest in Bitcoin futures is on a strong rise.

Recent data published by Skew indicates that demand for Bitcoin has been on a sharp rise on the crypto trading platform known as Bybit. On July 14th, it even reached a new high, at $434 million. Investors were interested in trading pairs against Tether (USDT), as well as USD.

Similar behavior was also seen when it comes to some other cryptos, including Ethereum, XRP, and EOS.

Why is open interest on the rise?

This so-called open interest is the value locked in derivatives contracts, such as options or futures contracts. Bybit itself is not too fond of the idea of aggregating open interest, however, since the BTC futures sector was rather calm recently, just like the asset’s own price.

Now, however, there seems to be a significant change, and the exchange’s CEO, Ben Zhou, believes that it may have happened due to an increase in exchange’s users.

After all, traders do not have many signs that BTC price will change dramatically in the near future, and the increase is rather sharp. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s volatility is at its lowest point in years, possibly due to its strong correlation with the stock market.

There were some suggestions that the stock market might enter into a sell-off, and drag BTC down, but for the moment, this remains only speculation. For now, BTC remains rather stable, apart from a $100 drop that took place yesterday, after Twitter hack that promoted a Bitcoin scam.