Yahoo Finance Bitcoin Scales $58K for First Time; YTD Gain Over 98%
Another day, another all-time high for the leading cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin (BTC) on Sunday set a new high water mark of $58,332.36, bringing the leading cryptocurrency’s year-to-date gain to over 100% less than two months into the year. For all of 2020, BTC rose 305%.
At press time, the price settled back to $58,148.31, up 2.3% over the last 24 hours, and cutting the YTD gain to over 98%.
Some are attributing the eye-popping rise to tremendous demand from buyers looking to hedge against inflation as governments keep spending and central banks keep printing money in a desperate effort to keep their economies afloat during the pandemic. Yet, despite all the printing and spending of fiat money, the key indicators aren’t reflecting inflation at all
“Through the insatiable buy-side pressure from exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuers, closed-end funds and large public corporations adding bitcoin to their positions, demand is massively outstripping supply,” said John Willock, chief executive at digital asset exchange Blocktane.
The current ramp-up in the price of BTC was ignited earlier this month by Tesla, when the electric-automobile manufacturer said it had purchased $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency for its treasury. This sparked a round of playing “who’s next?” in terms of investing treasury funds in BTC and the resulting hype helped focus the attention of main street investors on the sector overall.
Some have speculated that the series of all-time highs reached over the last several days is at least partly due to BTC-hungry MicroStrategy, which on Friday morning said it had raised more than $1 billion of debt in order to fund even more purchases of the cryptocurrency. The price of BTC has risen more than $5,000 since the company’s announcement.
