Perhaps you are looking for something more sinister here, but from that graph it seems to me that the likeliest explanation of the ballooning swaps on Finex is simply that they have gained a lot of users since December. I don't know for how long they have existed but I didn't actually try trading there until last winter, as part of me moving away from MtGox, and I suspect that may be true for a lot of other users as well. I think you would find that everything from Kraken to Huobi gained a lot of users during that time period.
I disagree that USD swaps balloons more than BTC swaps in general in your graph. If you cut out June the trend is not nearly as pronounced. In fact, both swap pairs follow an upwards trajectory with two major exceptions: people were in general very bearish in February (omg! look at those slopes!), and people are very bullish in June. You can also see the formation of a bullish trend in January which later falls apart spectacularly, and I think we all know why that was.
The BTC swaps are only one piece of evidence for what I believe to be the fact that Bitfinex hasn't grown by a factor of 9 since December. Here's something much better:
http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/6m/USD?c=e&t=a&volume_unit=btc I would say it grew by a factor of 2-3, a moving average would visualize this better.
Guys
Since when so called "moderators" are starting FUD threads?
Cui prodest?
Ask yourself this simple question and if your IQ is not lower than your shoe size you'll come up with the right conclusion.
Have a good day and a great weekend
Giancarlo
Bitfinex Team
I was excited when I saw you had come to post, yet you only leave an ad hominem attack without contributing to the topic, which is disappointing. Tell me, had it been the opposite ie BTC shorts piling on for months to alltime highs and me pointing it out, would you have said the same? I'm not intimately familiar with Bitfinex, so it's possible that some nuances are eluding me.