What caused this weekend’s BTC price surge? Hourly trading volumes suggest the catalyst was large orders on Bitfinex

Between Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, the price of bitcoin increased by over 10% to breach the $11,000 milestone. Although there has been a lot of speculation as to what may have caused the seemingly spontaneous surge, analysis of the hourly exchange trading volumes implies it was induced by a large investor or set of large investors on Bitfinex.

By examining the bitcoin trading volumes at the 10 exchanges vetted by Bitwise, we can see that trading activity went up fairly dramatically between Friday 11:00 p.m. UTC (7 p.m. EST) and Saturday 4 a.m. UTC (12 p.m. EST). During that time period, total hourly bitcoin trading volume peaked at $229 million with Binance being the largest contributor (38%) followed by Coinbase (20%) and Bitfinex (18%).