Status: 04/11/2023 10:48 a.m
The leading cryptocurrency is finding new followers: the Bitcoin price has almost doubled since last autumn. With 30,000 dollars, another important mark from the point of view of experts has now been reached.
The cryptocurrency market continues to grow. Bitcoin, the largest digital currency by market value, has climbed to a good $30,400 on the Bitstamp trading platform. For the first time since June last year, the price is now more than 30,000 dollars.
Crypto market has doubled again
Since the interim low in autumn 2022, the price increase has now totaled more than 90 percent. According to a list by the CoinMarketCap platform, the market value of all of the almost 23,000 cyber currencies rose by around four percent to $1.24 trillion. In November, this figure was at times less than $800 billion.
Bitcoin’s all-time high was reached in November 2021, when the value climbed to almost $69,000. After that, however, things went down until the cybercurrency stabilized at around $16,000 last fall and then began a slow rebound.
“Psychological Boost”
Experts confirm the current trend towards cryptocurrencies, even if the causes for this seem difficult to determine. According to Craig Erlam, market analyst at British broker OANDA, Bitcoin had benefited from the crisis in the banking industry in recent weeks.
The fact that he was able to hold onto these gains for so long after the industry calmed down following the takeover of Switzerland’s Credit Suisse by competitor UBS is “encouraging, even if the trigger for the initial rally is not particularly clear,” says Erlam . He sees breaking through the $30,000 mark as a “big psychological boost”.
Analyst Timo Emden from Emden Research makes increasing risk appetite among investors partly responsible for the current rise. “It is and remains the hope of investors that the simmering concerns about inflation and interest rates will lose momentum and that the monetary policy headwind on both sides of the Atlantic could ease further,” said Emden. The comparatively low trading volume over the Easter holidays could have triggered the further upward movement.
Banking crisis ensures decoupling
The consonance between the stock market and cryptocurrencies seems to have been broken in the past few weeks, as Cyrus de la Rubia from Hamburg Commercial Bank already commented on the rise in bitcoin before the Easter holidays. Cryptocurrencies have previously always given way when stocks have also given way. With the banking crisis in March, this pattern was broken for the first time: stocks lost, cryptocurrencies increased.
Investors have been turning to investment products based on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for weeks. According to stock exchange trader Jan Duisberg, who trades cryptocurrencies for the Baader Bank Indexfonds (ETF), demand for the products, which private investors can also purchase, has recently increased significantly. With the bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley Bank there was a “real boost”.
Crypto fan Elon Musk
Last but not least, Tesla boss and Twitter owner Elon Musk could have made a contribution to the current crypto trend. The billionaire had repeatedly advertised the crypto variant Dogecoin, which was actually created as a fun currency.
Most recently, the Dogecoin logo, a dog’s head, even temporarily replaced the Twitter bird as a distinctive feature in the Twitter app. As a result, the Dogecoin price rose by 20 percent in the past week and gave the cyber currency a market value of around 13 billion dollars.
New crises on the crypto market
However, there have also been some new signs of crisis in the crypto market in the past few weeks. The US derivatives market regulator CFTC has sued the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance and accuses it of various violations of applicable trading rules. Among other things, Binance failed to register properly with the CFTC. After the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange, Binance was the last major platform.
FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in the US in December after failed rescue attempts. According to the securities supervisory authority there, the crypto exchange is suspected of having embezzled customer funds.