Is Bitcoinmania back?
At the beginning of the year, bitcoin (BTC) has managed to achieve things that had eluded it last year.
First, to limit the impact of one of the biggest crypto fiascos -- the FTX collapse -- and then to resist fears related to the health of the economy. As a result, the first cryptocurrency in terms of market value has rebounded strongly since the beginning of the year.
Its prices passed the symbolic threshold of $25,000 on February 16. This happened around 11:05 a.m. ET: prices of the popular cryptocurrency soared to $25,230.24, a level not seen since last June, according to data from CoinGecko.
The prices of the most popular cryptocurrency then fell slightly. But the crossing of the psychological threshold of $25,000 suggests that investors are again ready to return to the market. BTC prices are up 53% this year. The rebound is 60.3% compared to November 9, when rumors of the bankruptcy of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto empire intensified. Two days later, cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its sister company Alameda Research, a hedge fund, filed for bankruptcy unable to meet withdrawal requests from their clients.
Crypto Market Is on the Rise
"A major move in Bitcoin is upon us," said Ed Moya, a senior market analyst, The Americas at OANDA. "There has been a major wave of institutional money coming into the exchanges over the past week, $1.6 billion according to data from Lookonchain."
He added that: "Bitcoin is showing strong resilience given the broader weakness across most risky assets."
Bitcoin is dragging the entire cryptocurrency market in its wake, which was up 4.7% in the past 24 hours to $1.2 trillion.
Ether (ETH), the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, had rallied as high as $1,701.12, which is up 42.2% this year. The last time ether prices were at this level was in September when Ethereum made its biggest update allowing for an acceleration in transactions and a big reduction in its energy consumption.
If the cryptocurrency market seems to want to turn the page of the crypto winter - long period of continuous price decline - we are still far from the records reached in November 2021 in the midst of cryptomania. Bitcoin prices then rose to $69,044.77, while those of Ether, the second currency by market value, reached $4,878.26.
The cryptocurrency market in total had exceeded $3 trillion at the time.
What is interesting to observe with the current rebound is that the industry is surrounded by bad news. There is the FTX fiasco which has yet to reveal all of its victims. Then there is the offensive of regulators, including the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which wants to toughen regulation of the crypto space.
