It eventually occurred on December 16th, 2020. The most prominent cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC), just returned to the USD 20,000 level for the first time since December 17th, 2017, when it touched USD 20,089. Some would think that this is almost a coincidence.
At 13:49 UTC, BTC was already trading at more than USD 20,150 on Binance, HitBTC, Coinbase Pro, and Bitstamp.
Later, it exceeded USD 20,680 and is now (15:42 UTC) trading at around USD 20,600. The price is up by 6% in a day and 12% in a week.
After plunging to nearly USD 3,000 in December 2018, BTC began its series of hitting all-time highs (ATH) only in November this year, nearly reaching USD 20,000 on the first days of December and later correcting almost USD 17,600.
Bitcoin Price chart:
The price is up by around 90% in the past three months and over 200% in a year.
“We have a new line in the sand, and the focus shifts to the next round number of USD 30,000,” Antoni Trenchev, Co-founder and Managing Partner of crypto lender Nexo, told Bloomberg. According to him, this “is the start of a new chapter for Bitcoin. It’s a narrative the media and retail crowd can properly latch onto because they’ve been noticeably absent from this rally.“
Trenchev recently stated,
“Whether the next big resistance will be at USD 50,000 or USD 500,000 is anyone’s guess, but we firmly believe the risk/return is skewed to the upside.”
“It’s very likely bitcoin will reach USD 100,000 in 2021 just based on corporate and institutional demand alone. We’re seeing sustained demand for hosting of miners as well, which usually indicates bullish trends in mining from months ago,” Blockstream’s Chief Strategy Officer Samson Mow recently published.
Mow isn’t the only one plugging this benchmark. Also pointing towards institutional and corporate demand, Quantum Economics analyst Lou Kerner thinks bitcoin will increasingly eat into gold’s share of the store-of-value market next year.
Meantime, Tim Rainey, the Chief Financial Officer at powerplant-cryptomining hybrid Greenidge Generation, stated he believes that “the price could easily reach the USD 25,000-USD 30,000 range” next year.
He asserted that,
“Unlike the 2017 bubble, bitcoin’s latest price rally is driven by stronger fundamentals — institutions saving reserves in cryptocurrency or integrating cryptocurrencies into their services.”
Also, according to Soravis Srinawakoon, CEO and Co-Founder of Sequoia-backed cross-chain data oracle Band Protocol (BAND), in 2017, there was a lack of products “for the new converts to experience.”
“Today, there are endless uses, protocols, services across farming, lending, standard trading, etc. Therefore we’d expect to see the new adopters hang around this time,” he replied in an emailed commentary, adding that the price of bitcoin can help improve the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries.
Meantime, Dmitry Tokarev, Chief Executive of London-based crypto custodian Copper Co., claims that BTC isn’t showing any signs of the explosive 30%-40% drops characteristic of previous major bull runs.
He stated that,
“Instead, there is an aggressive shift towards accepting the argument that bitcoin acts as a hedge against inflation. The outflows of gold into BTC supports this, and as evidenced by recent allocations from fund managers such as Ruffer here in the UK.”
As announced today, UK-based Ruffer Investment Company allocated 2.7% of its assets under management to bitcoin.
Ruffer spokesperson stated that,
“Ruffer’s exposure to bitcoin currently totals around GBP 550m [USD 744m].”
Tokarev added that,
“It’s also important to recognize the increasingly positive rhetoric from prominent institutional investors like JPMorgan, Blackrock, and Bridgewater. They are responsible for bidding up the digital currency’s price, and their respective executives have publicly endorsed bitcoin in recent months, in a way that would have been unheard of during the last comparative run of 2017.”
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