By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
As CME Group announces to start trading of Bitcoin futures on December 18, the Bitcoin price is back on an upward journey hitting new all-time high.
Last week amidst reports of U.S. courts orders to Coinbase to disclose 14,000 transactions to IRS, Bitcoin prices plummeted by straight 20% within 24 hours and some fear and volatility had gripped within the investor community. A massive sell-off was seen on popular exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini as the exchanges struggled to complete the transactions due to several interruptions and outages.
Following this, Director of Communications at Coinbase, David Farmer soon addressed the customers through his medium blog giving details of the proceedings and how the Coinbase team working to restore the operations.
However, this fear was short-lived as the Bitcoin prices again started showing signs of upward momentum and normalcy was resumed in the market. Ever since then, Bitcoin price has been comfortably trading around $10,000 zone and in the past three days, the upward momentum is observed again as Bitcoin gains by 15%. Yesterday, Bitcoin price touched a new all-time high of $11858.70 and is currently trading above $11500 according to CoinMarketCap.
With the recent upswing, founders of the Gemini digital currency exchange and twin brothers – Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss – have joined the Bitcoin billionaires list. The twin brother invested $11 million in bitcoins back in April 2013 with the holdings now translating to worth over $1 billion as Bitcoin price crosses $11,700 mark.
With more investor participation seen since the month of November, and more specifically after the CME Group announced Bitcoin futures, there is a considerable jump in the average daily trading volumes of bitcoin. In past few days, the daily trading volume is seen stabilizing around $5 billion. In case of strong rallies, these volumes spike to $10 billion and are again seen retracing back towards its stability zone during its normal days.
In another turn of events, the U.S. market is seen taking lead over the dominant Japanese markets and now grabs a 30% of the global share in Bitcoin market. This change can be attributed to the announcement of bitcoin-futures contract by major U.S.-based exchanges like CME Group, CBOE group and Nasdaq Inc. Also, one of the major reason for the 15% surge in Bitcoin prices in past 48 hours could well possibly be because of CME’s official announcement to start the trading process for Bitcoin futures contract since December 18.
Also, in another interesting turn of events, the largest bank on Wall Street – JPMorgan – has now changed gears and has been seen speaking in favor of Bitcoin. JPMorgan CEO – Jamie Dimon – has expressed hard criticism towards Bitcoin calling it a “fraud” and its investors as “stupid”. However, it seems that the unprecedented bull run and huge investor support for Bitcoin has forced the financial institution to see with a positive eye. There have also been reports floating about the bank planning to introduce Bitcoin futures contract for its customers.
JPMorgan global markets strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, recently spoke about how Bitcoin futures contract can bring stability and legitimacy to the markets. Nikolas said, “The prospective launch of bitcoin futures contracts by established exchanges, in particular, has the potential to add legitimacy and thus increase the appeal of the cryptocurrency market to both retail and institutional investors.”
Further singing to the tune of Leo Melamed, Nikolas said that Bitcoin has all the potential to be a new asset class and can prove to be a robust store of value further transforming the global financial sector. He said “In all, the prospective introduction of bitcoin futures has the potential to elevate cryptocurrencies to an emerging asset class. The value of this new asset class is a function of the breadth of its acceptance as a store of wealth and as a means of payment and simply judging by other stores of wealth such as gold, cryptocurrencies have the potential to grow further from here.”
The stage seems to be all set for Bitcoin futures contract to take over and give more strength to the cryptocurrency to enter the mainstream market.