Bitcoin surged back above $96,000, recovering slightly from a pullback this week that knocked it from record levels on Wednesday. The Bitcoin is climbing back toward the elusive US$100,000 price level again, snapping its longest losing since presidential victory triggered a record-breaking rally in the largest cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin price reached an all-time high of $99,728 on Friday before turning negative in the past four days. Bitcoin climbed as much as 6% to $97,361 on Wednesday. There has been a tremendous surge in Bitcoin, where It has more than doubled this year.
Cryptocurrency and stock market
Although bitcoin is widely viewed as a store of value and a digital alternative to gold, the cryptocurrency often trades in tandem with the stock market. On Wednesday, however, it secerned with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, which was lower by 0.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 dropped as well.
Crypto market update
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was last higher by nearly 6% at $96,676.70, according to Coin Metrics. Ether jumped more than 9% to $3,636.46. The broader crypto market, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, gained 7%.
Coinbase was up more than 6% as bitcoin lifted it along with other crypto stocks. Robinhood, which offers crypto trading and is viewed as a beneficiary of a more crypto-friendly environment in the incoming Trump administration, gained 3%. MicroStrategy, which trades as a proxy for bitcoin, advanced 9%.
Why a record surge in Bitcoin price?
Bitcoin price has been regularly hitting records since the November 5 presidential election, up about 38% in that time. On Friday, it rose as high as $99,849.99 before testing the $90,000 support level this week.
“The bitcoin bull market has legs,” Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, said in a report Wednesday. “There will be corrections and hiccups, which is normal. There could even some twilight regulatory or law enforcement actions that made the market nervous. But a combination of increasing institutional, corporate, and potentially nation-state adoption, a new U.S. administration that is shaping up to be extremely pro-bitcoin, and solid positioning and network data all point to higher over the near and medium term.”
As per Fairlead Strategies’ Katie Stockton at current levels, bitcoin investors are in “unchartered territory in terms of where there’s resistance — which, of course, there is none.” Meanwhile, support is around $74,000. Bitcoin reached $92,000 for the first time ever just two weeks ago, on November 13.
Expectations from Bitcoin
The market is in price discovery, the dip over the last couple of days looks like a healthy pullback after a 45%+ move higher from pre-election lows. Likely fueled by profit-taking,” said Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute. “Traders are looking at the $100,000 level as very likely to break.”
Some of the earlier decline in Bitcoin this week was caused by people taking profits as the price neared the historic milestone, according to Nikolay Karpenko, a director at B2C2. That was tactical, and Bitcoin is likely to cross US$100,000 soon, he said.
“Bitcoin does tend to stair step both to the downside and to the upside, meaning that it sees these very sharp runups and then consolidates,” she said. “People should … be willing to give bitcoin, and the cryptocurrencies in general, more room because of the volatility there and also because of the long-term potential.”
Bitcoin is up 126% for the year and is still widely expected to reach the $100,000 milestone before the year is over. Ether, the outperformer since the election, is trailing bitcoin on a year-to-date basis with a 59% gain.
