The price of bitcoin has been steadily moving up over the last few months, hitting a new all-time high above $50,000 earlier today before a breakout was rejected and the cryptocurrency’s price dropped back down to $49,100 at press time.
The price of bitcoin started surging in October of last year, after PayPal announced it was letting users in the U.S. buy, sell, and hold crypto and planned on rolling out the feature to other jurisdictions. Corporate adoption of the cryptocurrency soon started growing, with MicroStrategy, Square, MassMutual, and others gaining exposure to BTC.
The price of bitcoin started rising to $50,000 after Tesla announced it bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, and was planning on accepting payments in the cryptocurrency. More recently, the world’s largest custodian bank, Bank of New York Mellon (NYSE: BK), has revealed it will start financing bitcoin and other digital currencies through the rollout of a new cryptocurrency custody service.
Adoption is still growing, with Mastercard earlier this month revealing it is planning on giving merchants the option of receiving payments directly in cryptocurrencies later this year, through a new functionality that would add on existing partnerships that let consumers pay in crypto, but converts the funds to fiat.
The rise of BTC has seen many speculate we’re entering bubble territory. In 2017, the cryptocurrency moved to a near $20,000 all-time high over a bubble in the initial coin offering (ICO) sector, which ultimately popped and saw BTC drop back down to little over $3,000 after a year-long bear market.
Jack Purdy, a cryptocurrency researcher at Messari, pointed out that the bitcoin price chart this year looks “near identical” to the price chart of August 2017, when bitcoin was trading at about $2,700 and before it surged to a near $20,000 high.
Civic founder Vinny Lingham commented on the charts and said that “this isn’t a bubble, yet” and pointed out that the next bubble “is still coming,” seemingly also implying the price of bitcoin is set to surge exponentially in the near future, potentially leading to a market bubble.
It’s worth noting that pseudonymous crypto analyst smart Contracter has predicted the bull market top would be at $50,000. Smart Contracter is well-known for accurately calling the market’s bottom back in 2018.
Featured image via Pixabay.
