Wednesday was an outstanding day for volume at LMAX Digital. We’ve already highlighted we had been seeing the start to a pickup in volume over the past couple of weeks after a period of lower volume in the aftermath of record volume in May, and that pickup accelerated on Wednesday, helped along by the recovery in crypto markets.

Total notional volume for Wednesday pushed back above a yard for the first time since early July, coming in at $1.2 billion and 42% above 30-day average volume. Bitcoin volume came in at $725 million, 52% above 30-day average volume, and ether volume came in at $304 million, 35% above 30-day average volume.

A lot of talk around yesterday’s panel with Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Cathie Wood at ‘The B Word Panel’ to discuss institutional adoption of bitcoin, though ultimately, not much substance in the conversation. But clearly positive on the whole. The market did seem to like the fact that Musk talked about his ownership of both bitcoin and ether.

On the regulatory side, we heard from Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC, who reminded his audience there were still a number of creative token-based securities that needed to report to the commission, suggesting many operations were not immune and would indeed be at risk of coming under added scrutiny.

But perhaps the most interesting news of the day came from a Goldman Sachs survey revealing half of its family office clients were interested in taking on exposure to cryptocurrency. The survey also showed that 15% of respondents already had some exposure to the asset class.

The biggest takeaway in our view was the reasoning behind the desire to take exposure, which was based in an understanding of the value of bitcoin as a hedge against the current market environment of higher inflation, exhausted monetary policy and extended equities.