There's a common belief among people that crypto markets have a set opening and closing time, but do crypto markets close?
Unlike traditional stock markets with a fixed opening and closing time, crypto markets are built differently and have their way of functioning and conducting transactions. After all, with blockchains and smart contracts, much of the human elements are no longer required.
Here's a closer look at the crypto market trading hours.
Do Crypto Markets Close?
To answer your burning query, no. crypto markets do not close. They operate 24/7 on all days and offer crypto trading throughout the year.
This is in contrast to the traditional stock market, which has more rigid trading hours, and is only open Monday to Friday.
Of course, there is one big caveat here. While crypto markets never close, cryptocurrency exchanges can. While they mainly operate 24/7, periods of maintenance or high congestion occasionally mean these exchanges pause trading on certain pairings.
This means if Coinbase is down, for example, or the Binance App is not working, you might not be able to trade.
However, the term open and closing can be used in a crypto context.
- Read More: Fiat Currency vs Cryptocurrency: What is the difference?
Does The Crypto Market Close On Weekends?
As stated above, crypto market are functional 24 hours a day throughout the week and do not close on weekends.
The fact that crypto markets are decentralised and do not require any central medium to verify transactions is one of the reason why they work 24/7 without any interruptions.
Crypto Time Zones
Turns our crypto market functions 24×7 without ever shutting down giving users a chance to explore trading as per their discretion.
However, per a popular notion, cryptocurrencies run on UTCtime zones. According to the crypto hash, 12 am to 1 am is considered a "volatile" time to trade Bitcoin.
On the other hand, research further highlighted how hours between 8 am to 10 am on UTC on Monday are 35% less volatile compared with other average days.
What Time Does The Crypto Market Open And Close?
While the cryptocurrency market does not open and close, many price trackers still display prices at open and close.
The opening time is 12:00 AM UTC, and the closing time is 11:59 PM UTC. However, the market doesn't actually close at this time. It is moreso just an arbitrary window used to track the prices of cryptocurrency, based on more traditional finance markets.
Indeed, CoinMarketCap describes these times as the "Earliest data in range" and "Latest data in range".
As such, there are no actual opening or closing times for the crypto market. Activity may vary in these times depending on the number of traders awake, but there's no stopping this crypto market, it seems.