By
Steve Muchoki
April 23rd, 2024
Bitcoin rose to its highest level since September 18th, following PayPal’s announcement about bitcoin integration.
On September 23rd, bitcoin price increased to its highest rate since September 18th and achieved $443.69.
According to the USD Bitcoin Price Index, bitcoin value rose by 11.12% from $398.89.
There recent bitcoin price decline provoked active debates about the reasons of such downturn, which ranged from merchant adoption to growing industrial mining.
What concerns the latest surge, it is likely to be attributed to the announcement made by PayPal. Online payment company said it now accepts digital currency on its PayPal Payments Hub platform through BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin. Price increases were observed from 13:15 BST to 14:30 BST, just minutes after the announcement.
Since September 18th, when bitcoin price dropped to $387.76, the cryptocurrency had been floating about $400 rate over the last week.
Raffael Danielli, author of Matlab Trading blog, believes the news influenced the price increase, what is proved by data from main exchanges. Speaking to CoinDesk, he said: “The spike today is a nice example of news hitting the market and how the market reacts.”
Similarly, bitcoin price on the CoinDesk CNY BPI rose to ¥2,717.18, 7.07% higher from the opening price of ¥2,472.20.
The price boost was recorded directly upon publications by Forbes, CoinDesk and TechCrunch about PayPal’s bitcoin integration.
Thus, bitcoin price on Bitstamp, the largest global bitcoin exchange, skyrocketed from $395.29 at 13:15 BST to $450.00 within an hour. Similar changes were noted at Bitfinex, where the prices rose from $397.06 at 13:15 BST to $445.27 in the next hour at 14:15 BST.
Prices on CNY exchanges and major USD exchanges grew similarly, although prices had fallen in the market since achieving the peak. For instance, bitcoin value on Huobi increased to ¥2,735 at 14:30 BST from ¥2424.70 an hour earlier.
Similar trajectory was observed on OKCoin, China’s largest exchange.
The recent price increase indicates that the downward trend may change in the future. Still, according to BFXdata, situation on the investors market has also changed.
In spite of high bitcoin swaps activity that started on September 20th, BFXdata showed a sharp decline on the market from 14:15 BST.
BTC-e, Bitfinex and OKCoin are three main bitcoin exchanges, offering margin trading. This instrument enables investors to place wagers on either positive or negative future performance of digital currency.
The decline in overall swaps suggests a number of investors may have closed their short positions on bitcoin, as the data gives only the total sum and it is unknown how many traders have closed those positions.