Despite the fact that no anyone is trading it, Bitcoin is up 12% this month.

The biggest digital currency in the world has increased by more than 12% since the start of June. According to statistics from Coin Metrics, its price on Wednesday exceeded $30,000 and reached its highest point since April 14.

Market participants have ascribed the increase to the announcement that American asset management company BlackRock has registered for an exchange-traded fund to follow the market price of the underlying commodity, spot bitcoin.

Even if this might be a contributing factor, there are other explanations for the unusual activities that go beyond the news coverage of major institutions embracing Bitcoin and other digital assets.

This year, the "market depth" of cryptocurrencies has been quite low. The term "market depth" describes a market's capacity to accommodate reasonably sizable buy and sell orders. Prices can fluctuate significantly up or down when market depth is minimal and large players place orders to buy or sell digital currencies, even if the orders themselves are not very large.

Liquidity in a market is gauged by market depth.

The market depth of Bitcoin has decreased by 20% since the beginning of this year, claims data provider Kaiko. When it comes to market depth, Kaiko claimed that Bitcoin has been among the most severely impacted cryptocurrencies.

The limited amount of trades taking place on exchanges is another significant aspect of the present cryptocurrency market.

According to the cryptocurrency monitoring website CoinGecko, the daily trading volume of the cryptocurrency is presently about $24 billion.

This is far less than the more than $100 billion in total trading volume for Bitcoin at the height of the 2021 crypto boom when the cryptocurrency came very nearly to an all-time high of about $69,000.

The market's momentum during the last bitcoin cycle was mostly driven by well-known, institutional players like investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to provide their clients access to digital money, they established trading desks.

However, it wasn't until retail traders began to pay attention that the market truly began to take off. In early 2021, many were drawn in by the emergence of NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, and other more speculative bets.

Later on in the year, the price of Bitcoin soared to previously unheard-of heights, sparking a seismic rise in the cryptocurrency market. This was concurrent with soaring trade volume, which, according to CoinGecko, increased from $21.2 billion at the beginning of 2020 to $105.4 billion on Nov. 9, 2021, when Bitcoin reaches its all-time high.

The amount of trade today is far less than it was during the peak of the 2021 cryptocurrency boom.

(Sources: cnbc.com, kaiko.com, coingecko.com)