The price of Bitcoin today abruptly jumped to over $6,800 today. At the time of writing, the price is at $6,823.42 on Coinmarketcap.
There are a number of factors that could have contributed to this sudden jump. Bitcoin, and Cryptocurrencies more generally, have seen a plethora of good news this week.
For instance, South Korea (which is a major trading market) announced that they were loosening restrictions on all manners of cryptocurrency trading across the board, including examining allowing domestic ICOS.
This is according to the Korean Times, who stated, “Financial regulators plan to ease rules on crypto-based assets in line with policies initiated by G20 nations to establish “unified regulations.”
Another major occurrence is the increasingly successful lightning network. Some reports making the rounds online have even stated that the lightning network capacity is increasing 50% every week. Additionally, 20 new stores per day are accepting Lightning payments.
By far the biggest piece of news, however, is that Coinbase announced on Monday that their “Coinbase Custody” product was officially live.
What’s interesting to note about this Bitcoin price spike is that it occurred very suddenly at 5:45 PM Pacific time after a day of relative price stability.
This conclusion was based upon examining Coinmarketcap’s charting feature for Bitcoin which I encourage our readers to verify themselves.
Meanwhile, Coindesk (a major cryptocurrency news source) retweeted the Coinbase Custody announcement at exactly 5:45 PM. Now, it is somewhat speculative to link the entirety of this latest Bitcoin price spike to this retweet.
That said, I believe is it is absolutely reasonable to assume that Coindesk has a large enough media footprint (they have 741k followers on Twitter) such that a single retweet from could cause something like this to happen.
Other potential factors that may have impacted the price spike include so-called crypto “whales” choosing this moment to place large buy orders For Bitcoin. Since the supply of Bitcoin is finite (21,000,000 total theoretical supply of Bitcoin, with only 17,137,187 currently circulating), it stands to reason that large buy or share orders can impact the price significantly.
Since the overall cryptocurrency market prices tend to mirror Bitcoin in terms, these large buy orders could have theoretically resulted in a temporary feedback loop, where altcoin prices rose due to the Bitcoin price spike, which in turn led to the Bitcoin price spiking even more because of the potential for a “Bull Run.”
For our less experienced readers, The Financial Times defines a “Bull Run” as a period of time when prices rise on a financial market