The size of bets being placed on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on New Zealand-domiciled platform Easy Crypto have doubled in the past six months to the largest they’ve ever been.
Easy Crypto founder Janine Grainger revealed the number of buy orders had increased too, by 90 per cent in the six months to March.
A lot of those buying were new customers, with 42 per cent more sign-ups to the platform than a year ago.
“With the global interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mounting, Easy Crypto has had a great start to the year.”
She said 99.5 per cent of its customers investing in Bitcoin now had positive returns due to recent rises in its price.
It had increased 60 per cent so far this year, to a new record price above $110,000.
“[Bitcoin] has moved to become 40 per cent of our overall volume this quarter, versus the last.” Grainger said.
“We see elevated sell activity from some groups as some customers are choosing this time to take some profit, but the sheer crypto total that Kiwis are buying shows that there is a clear movement of people buying up crypto, and the average buy order size is the highest it’s ever been.”
Grainger would not provide the dollar figure for the average buy order size, nor for total buy and sell orders, citing commercial sensitivity.
She said the demand on her platform was still below the all-time highest interest of May 2021, when Bitcoin’s price reached around $81,000 and subsequently fell to around $47,700.
“May 2021 was our all-time high for turnover – in general, the whole of 2021 was a period of high sales.”
Janine Grainger, founder of Easy Crypto.
Bitcoin ETFs booming
Investors now had more means to get exposure to the price of Bitcoin, with spot-price exchange-traded funds (ETFs) by BlackRock and other firms launched in January and available on online share trading platforms such as Sharesies and Hatch.
To date, those 10 funds had seen $11 million worth of inflows from New Zealand investors on Sharesies, and $2m worth of outflows, by around 3800 investors.
More than half of those trades were for BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, a Sharesies spokeswoman said, while the Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF and the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF were the next most-popular funds.
Globally, the Bitcoin ETFs had US$$55 billion in assets in their first two months, according to Bloomberg.
Bitcoin was set to undergo a halving event in April, where the reward earned for mining Bitcoin would be cut in half, limiting its supply.
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