Cryptocurrency Trading Volume Could Surpass Apple's

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Jens Nordvig, the founder and CEO of Exante Data and a respected investment strategist, told CNBC that he believes the daily trading volume of the cryptocurrency industry will "likely soon surpass" that of Apple The global daily trading volume between bitcoin and , the two leading cryptocurrencies, and into traditional currencies has grown by a factor of 8 so far this year, Nordvig explained. Now, the average daily cryptocurrency trading volume is coming in at over $3 billion, while Apple's is about $4 billion per day. Should the trends continue, Nordvig believes that digital currency trades will surpass Apple's in the near future. Still, Nordvig hesitated to place too much emphasis on digital currencies as viable long-term alternatives to fiat currencies.

Cryptocurrency Trading is Exploding
Nordvig wrote an analytic report late last week suggesting that "cryptocurrency trading volume is now more than $3bn/day on average, and will likely soon surpass that of the the world' most liquid stock: Apple ($4bn/day). This shift is largely due to the trading volumes of top digital currencies like ethereum and bitcoin, the latter of which grew to five times its price at the start of the year before falling in response to the news that China would shut down digital currency exchanges. Critical words from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon around the same time may have also contributed to the price tumbling. Nonetheless, even with recent price drops, bitcoin has grown to nearly triple the price it began 2017 with.

The Field Continues to Grow
Beyond bitcoin and ethereum, a rapidly growing field of cryptocurrencies is contributing to the surge in daily trading volume, too. CoinMarketCap has suggested that there are more than 350 cryptocurrencies each carrying a market value of over $1 million at this time. As of last week, the total market cap for all digital currencies was more than $120 billion, down from a high earlier in the summer of closer to $180 billion. Ethereum, for its part, only trades around $250 per token, but this is more than 25 times the original price at the start of the year.

At the same time that digital currencies have exploded into prominence, average daily trade volume for U.S. stocks has declined rapidly. CNBC points out that this figure fell in the month of August to the lowest levels in three years. All that being said, though, Nordvig remains skeptical that digital currencies will be able to fully replace traditional currencies over the long term. "We do not believe that one can predict with confidence at this point that any given cryptocurrency will continue to thrive and gain status as an alternative to traditionall currencies in the long term," he said. "But we look forward to using the information from an increasingly active cryptocurrency market in our tracking of global capital flows, when appropriate."