'The market is robust:' A trader backed by Goldman Sachs bumps up the minimum to make a bitcoin trade to $500,000

• Circle Trade, the trading operation of Circle, has increased their minimum ticket size on bitcoin trades to $500,000.
• The move comes during a trading lull in the market for digital currencies across crypto exchange venues.
• Chief executive Jeremy Allaire told Business Insider the size of block trades has grown significantly since the beginning of the year.

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Trading activity at one of the largest cryptocurrency trading shops is picking up despite a lull across exchanges that trade crypto.

In an interview with Business Insider, Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire said the size of block trades made by Circle Trade, the firm's over-the-counter trading desk, has grown significantly since the beginning of the year.Advertisement

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That's despite a share decline in cryptocurrency trading volumes across retail exchanges. Per data from CoinMarketCap, 24-hour trading volumes are down to about $20 billion a day from all-time highs near $70 billion at the beginning of the year.

But "the market is robust" for Circle.

"The minimum ticket size has moved up to $500,000 with an average of $1 million," Allaire said.

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Some transactions, according to Allaire, are larger than $100 million. Previously, the minimum ticket size for a trade at Circle was $250,000.

"That water mark will continue to rise," Allaire said.OTC trading occurs off exchange venues, such as Coinbase's GDAX or Kraken, for instance. The point of such desks is to provide a platform for high-net-worth crypto-holders and institutions to make large trades without impacting the broader market.Advertisement

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As a alternative to crypto-exchanges, they typically have deeper liquidity to support such transactions. One industry insider told Business Insider that deeper liquidity in OTC markets has played into the growth of a number of trading shops.

"If I have $5 million, I can't do that trade on GDAX," the person said.

OTC desks can also provide a more secure alternative to crypto exchanges, which are known for hacks and outages.Advertisement

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Circle, which counts investment bank Goldman Sachs as a a strategic backer, trades more than $2 billion in cyptocurency a month. It recently opened operations in Asia, Bloomberg reported.

Recently, Circle announced it acquired Poloniex, a cryptocurrency exchange. It plans to scale the business by bringing it to new markets, adding the number of coins on its platform, and enabling fiat-to-crypto transactions.

Elsewhere in the cypto OTC market, DRW's Cumberland operates a trading desk. Kraken, as Business Insider first reported, recently launched their own, too.Advertisement

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A person familiar with operations at Genesis, another cryptocurrency trading shop, told Business Insider its average trade size has increased to about $300,000. The company trades $1 to $2 billion a month, the person said.