By
Steve Muchoki
April 23rd, 2024
For the first time ever the price of Bitcoin has crosses the $12,000 mark.
The price of Bitсoin has just hit a new all-time high, crossing the $12,000 barrier for the first time ever. Markets climbed as high as $12,524.30, according to CoinMarketCap’s Bitcoin Index. This figure surpasses the previous all-time high of $11,858 set on December 03, 2017.
At press time Bitcoin is trading at $12,461.00 with a market capitalization around $199 billion. The total market capitalization has reached $354 billion, with Bitcoin alone contributing $208 of the total according to the CoinMarketCap.
The Bitcoin graph of the past three month shows that after hitting a low of $5850.03 back on November 12, post the cancellation of SegWit2x hard fork, the cryptocurrency has been on a continuous upward momentum.
It was just in last week that Bitcoin had to go through a major correction with its price dropping by a whopping 20% to a low of $9339. A huge sell-off was seen on famous exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini as the exchanges struggled to faced outages and struggled to meet the orders.
This massive correction was seen following the orders from U.S. Courts to Coinbase, to disclose 14000 transactions to the IRS. However, Director of communications at Coinbase – David Farmer took to his Medium blog to explain its customers and bring clarity to the news. Soon things calmed down and ever since then, Bitcoin has been back in action towards its upward journey.
There has been a lot of growing skepticism about Bitcoin, and again many prominent personalities from the financial world have started asked new and budding investors to remain cautious at these levels.
However, there are still a few investors who are quite supporting this upswing and believe that in times to come, Bitcoin will scale to newer heights.
Commenting on this latest Bitcoin upswing, Leonhard Weese, president of the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong said “There is a lot of money flowing into Bitcoin right now, mostly motivated by ”fear of missing out“ and greed.”
CLSA’s managing director and equity strategist, Chris Wood, believes that the momentum is still intact and Bitcoin is all set to rally further from these levels. In his weekly note GREED & fear, he wrote “ GREED and fear would be surprised if the cryptocurrency story did not run further.
But the longer term story is whether governments regulate cryptocurrencies out of existence or co-opt blockchain technology for their own purposes. Meanwhile, an old-fashioned GREED & fear favors gold and gold stocks even though it is clear that money that might otherwise have gone into gold plays of late has been attracted to the crypto phenomenon.” –
Another long-time Bitcoin supporter and investor – Mike Novogratz – during his recent interview with Bloomberg said that Bitcoin can probably reach $40000 by the end of 2018. Although things are currently flowing in favor of the optimists, this month will be important in deciding the further growth of Bitcoin.
Two major exchanges – CBOE and CME Group – are launching their Bitcoin futures contract on Dec 10 and Dec 18 respectively. Joining the party will be Nasdaq Inc and Tokyo Financial Exchange, who have recently announced their plan to launch Bitcoin futures contract in 2018.