5 March 2024
On Monday, a flood of capital brought Bitcoin within striking distance of record values, sending it soaring to a two-year high and breaching past $68,000. At its peak, the price was $68,800.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $67,980, up 6.6% and 20.6% in the daily and weekly timeframes, data from Coingecko shows.
In recent weeks, as investment in bitcoin funds listed in the United States has increased dramatically, the value of the biggest cryptocurrency by market cap has increased by half this year.
Bitcoin Heating Up
As more and more people get interested in and optimistic about the market, Bitcoin’s incredible upward trajectory becomes clear in a thorough examination of the weekly chart.
The bitcoin price has recently surged, helped along in part by the adoption of spot Bitcoin ETFs, and is already approaching the all-time high of $69K, which the cryptocurrency attained in November 2021. It has already surpassed numerous important resistance levels.
Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of crypto exchange Nexo, stated that after the launch of these nine new ETFs, major market movements no longer occur on weekends but rather during the regular trading week.
Trenchev also pointed out that today’s events could be a repeat of last week’s, when bitcoin’s value increased by $10,000 in a matter of days.
The price of bitcoin has soared this year, and its market capitalization has already topped $1.3 trillion, making it one of the biggest assets in the world.
The most valuable cryptocurrency in the world, Bitcoin, has surpassed Meta Platforms (META), the parent company of Facebook, and is currently approaching silver’s market value of $1.4 trillion, according to figures provided by CompaniesMarketCap.
More than half of the $2.17 billion net flows into the top ten US spot bitcoin funds in the week leading up to March 1 went into BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT.O), opens new tab, according to statistics from LSEG.
Ethereum, a smaller competitor, has capitalised on rumors that it, too, could soon offer exchange-traded funds that stimulate inflows. It is up 50% year-to-date and reached two-year highs on Tuesday, rising 2.5% to $3,517.
Bitcoin Leads The Way
Simultaneously, Bitcoin boosted many cryptocurrency tokens, particularly meme currencies. Dogecoin saw a 30% increase, and Shiba Inu had a 90% surge. People who have been sitting on their hands during the current crypto rise are finally getting back into it, according to analysts. According to crypto data source Kaiko, the weekly transaction volume of meme tokens climbed to its highest level since late 2021 last week.
#Bitcoin is about to enter price discovery (again) and people are somehow bearish?
couldn’t be me.
— Caleb Franzen (@CalebFranzen) March 4, 2024
Meanwhile, Cubic Analytics CEO Caleb Franzen made the observation in a Sunday report that Bitcoin is beating the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index (NDX). Breaking over a critical level connecting the first quarter and end quarter of 2021 highs, he characterized bitcoin’s breakout versus NDX as “very encouraging.”
“Bitcoin is about to enter price discovery (again) and people are somehow bearish? Couldn’t be me,” he said in an X post Monday.
Joel Kruger, a market strategist at digital currency exchange LMAX Group, told CBS MoneyWatch that investors are seeing the benefits of treating bitcoin as an uncorrelated asset, which makes it very appealing for portfolio diversification.
Featured image from P2E Crypto Media, chart from TradingView