The price of bitcoin has moved up towards the $19,000 mark after gaining visibility among investors via a story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, that pointed out BTC is trading close to its previous all-time high and has found an audience among institutional investors.
The Wall Street Journal’s report pointed out that new BTC supporters include billionaire investors Paul Tudor Jones, who has revealed over 1% of his assets are in bitcoin, and Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller, who owns BTC as part of his investment portfolio. It adds other public figures now support the flagship cryptocurrency.
The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the flagship cryptocurrency comes at a time in which PayPal has started letting its users buy, sell, and hold BTC, BCH, ETH, and LTC and the firm’s CEO, Dan Schulman, defends cryptocurrency usage across its network of millions of merchants
Several publicly traded companies, including MicroStrategy and Square, has made large investments in the cryptocurrency earlier this year, which coupled with BTC’s decreased inflation rat since the halving in May – which cut block rewards from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC – has helped the cryptocurrency’s price grow to briefly test the $19,000 mark earlier today.
CryptoCompare data shows the cryptocurrency is now trading at $18,850 after seeing its move above $19,000 get rejected. Bitcoin’s all-time high, it’s worth noting, was near $20,000 back in December 2017. In the last 12 months, bitcoin’s price is up 173%.
Source: CryptoCompare
As CryptoGlobe reported, data shows BTC’s market capitalization is now above $340 billion, which means it is above that of MasterCard, whose market capitalization is slightly above $332.8 billion. The rise of BTC, coupled with growth in other sectors of the crypto space, has seen the total market capitalization of all cryptoassets surpass $500 billion.
Featured image via Unsplash.
