It’s been a couple of weeks, and Bitcoin’s relentless upward drive seems to be continuing, at least for now.
It wasn’t too long ago that sad BTC investors watched the coin tank below $6500, then $4000.
With gains over the weekend and this morning, Bitcoin (BTC) has risen up above that critical $9000 mark to rest around $9300 as of press time.
“Bitcoin is currently up about 2.69% on the day, trading around $9,341 at press time, according to Coin360,” writes Adrian Zmudzinski at Cointelegraph this morning. “Looking at its weekly chart, the coin is up around 18%.”
Zmudzinski also notes Ethereum gains around 1%, and impressive Ripple (XRP) gains around 4%, with over 1% gains each for Litecoin and Ethereum Classic:
“Ether is holding onto its position as the largest altcoin by market cap, which currently stands at just under $29.1 billion. The second-largest altcoin, Ripple’s, has a market cap of $18.3 billion at press time … Coin360 data shows that ETH has seen its value increase by about 1.5% over the last 24 hours. At press time, ETH is trading around $273. On the week, the coin has also gained over 15% of value.”
Looking back further, we see that Ethereum, like Bitcoin, has risen a lot more than 15% in a relatively short timeline: At the end of last year, ETH stood under $100! This new high represents more than a doubling in less than three quarters – not too shabby for any kind of investment. Ethereum’s rise has seemed to march in lockstep with BTC – as the general market sags under pressure, crypto coins are booming.
Long-time Bitcoin tracker Yuval Gov at Cryptopotato updated us yesterday on what this activity looks like to him – and he doesn’t leave out the historical context.
“If you had to put up a survey during late December 2018, when Bitcoin was hovering around $3500, you would find almost no one saying that 2019 will be bullish for Bitcoin. However, crypto is always unexpected,” Gov writes. “The numbers show that Bitcoin completes a 200%+ move since 2019 begun as well as a weekly move of 24%.”
Gov posits more growth for Bitcoin based on two items. The first one is the emergence of Facebook’s pre-nascent stablecoin. The second is a very interesting and astute analysis of the crypto landscape and a big move by major exchange Binance.
“There’s bullishness surrounding the coin,” Gov writes, “probably due to the hype of the coming up Facebook coin, along with Binance closing its gates to US traders (which probably caused many to hedge their altcoins into Bitcoin).”
So if you think about what traders are likely to do when they have to remove holdings from Binance, Gov’s theory makes a lot of sense.
We’re not suggesting unbridled optimism on BTC, (there’s always likely to be some correction after a runup like this) but for the reasons described above, and others, BTC is still a popular place to put your money as crypto pwns the general market.
