On September 18, bitcoin price surged from $3,600 to $4,040, recording a 13 percent increase within the past 24 hours as global markets stabilized
All major regional markets including Japan, the US, China and South Korea demonstrated increase in demand from traders, as bitcoin price rose by over 10 percent on every bitcoin exchange market globally. Chinese news sources including CnLedger revealed that cryptocurrency traders are purchasing bitcoin and Ethereum with high premiums, further increasing the price of bitcoin in the Chinese market.
More to that, although fiat deposits on major platforms including OKCoin and Huobi were halted on September 15, CnLedger revealed that traders made several bulk purchases of bitcoin over the past few days, with one trader purchasing more than 17,000 bitcoins through a single order.
The continuous rise in demand toward bitcoin in the Chinese market despite the crackdown on bitcoin exchanges and trading platforms is important to acknowledge because earlier today, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese government is preparing a nationwide ban on bitcoin as a whole. While the National Internet Finance Association of China (NIFA) announced last week that the government does not intend to ban the usage of bitcoin, China-based WSJ reporters noted that rumors on the potential imposition of stricter regulations and policies on bitcoin have begun to recirculate.
Yet, regardless of the rumors and the likelihood of Chinese financial regulators implementing stricter policies on bitcoin usage in the upcoming months, the global bitcoin exchange market is demonstrating an increase in demand toward bitcoin because traders have started to recognize the minimal impact of the Chinese bitcoin exchange market over the global bitcoin market.
On September 17, Japan officially took over the US market to become the largest bitcoin exchange market in the world with a staggering 50.7 percent market share of the global bitcoin exchange market. Japan still remains as the largest bitcoin market with 47.5 percent market share, approximately twice of the market share of the US.
As China isolates itself from the global bitcoin industry, exchanges, trading platforms, traders, investors and users will simply move over to Japan and South Korea. Markets will quickly stabilize and bitcoin price will be en route to achieving new all-time highs. As prominent venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya said on CNBC’s Fast Money:
“What countries can constrain today is how it [bitcoin] is effectively traded but it cannot be controlled. It is a fundamentally distributed system that exists peer to peer. And so to the extent that you can basically eliminate the will and the actions of every single person in the world, you can eliminate it. But in the absence of that, the genie is fundamentally out of the bottle.”
The Japanese, South Korean and American bitcoin exchange markets are evolving at a rapid rate, with many US-based exchanges including Gemini and Coinbase providing efficient and robust infrastructures for institutional and retail investors. More to that, as global markets continue to demonstrate volatility due to the growing conflict between North Korea and the US, demand toward bitcoin as a safe haven asset and long-term investment will only rise further.