As votes arrived on the night of the US presidential election, traders opened and closed positions at CME.

When the votes arrived on the night of November 3, the day of the U.S. presidential election, the volume of Bitcoin (BTC) skyrocketed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, or CME.

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„Overnight, before 9:00 am NYT, more than 6,700 Bitcoin futures contracts were traded (equivalent to 33,500 Bitcoins), 75% more than what has been observed to date [year to date] and more than double the volume observed since the launch,“ a CME Group spokesperson told Cointelegraph on Wednesday.

6,700 CME’s Bitcoin futures contracts were traded between 5 pm CST on November 3 and 8 am CST on November 4. CME Bitcoin futures are traded 23 hours a day, between 5 pm and 4 pm. Each contract is worth 5 BTC. That means that overnight during the U.S. presidential election, CME hosted 33,500 Bitcoin in trading volume, that’s approximately USD 462 million, based on a rough estimate of the average Bitcoin price during that time window.

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Such volume is 75% higher than the average share seen on the stock market during that same window on any other night last year, the representative said.

In addition, the stock exchange welcomes today more than ever before big market players. „Before the election, the number of Long Term Open Interest Holders (LOIHs, large traders as defined by the CFTC) set a new record, 102,“ said the spokesman.

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The month of November also started strong, showing an increase in the number of Bitcoin positions that participants have, this is known as open interest (OI). „The average daily OI of futures during the first two days of November has increased by 20% from October, reaching 11,929 contracts,“ they said. The early action in November is logically not a surprise, given the interest in construction operations that was seen near the end of last month, expressed in the average daily volume, or ADV. The spokesman said:

The spokesman said, „Bitcoin’s weekly ADV for futures increased significantly in the week before the election. An average of 11,428 contracts (equivalent to 57,140 Bitcoins) were traded daily in the last week of October, 164% more than in the first full week of October.

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CME is looking back on a positive year for Bitcoin trading, while Bitcoin has made an amazing run so far, especially given its March 2020 low of about USD 3,800.