Price Point
Bitcoin (BTC) shot past $50,000 for the first time Tuesday to a new all-time high price.
The gain took the year-to-date return to about 70%, and traders immediately began to discuss what comes next.
- “We’re still in the midst of a violent bull run that will soon be more violent,” Ari Paul, chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, tweeted Sunday.
- “We’re concerned about the pace of these market moves and would therefore recommend proceeding with caution over the short term,” Joel Kruger, cryptocurrency strategist at LMAX Digital, said in an email. NOTE: A price correction on Monday led to more than $520 million of futures-positions liquidations.
- Bank of America, in a monthly investor survey of the “most crowded trades,” said that “long bitcoin” – bets on further price gains – slipped to second place behind “long tech.” Bets against the U.S. dollar (“short dollar”) ranked third.
In traditional markets, U.S. stock futures pointed toward a higher open. “The reflation trade is powering assets tied to economic growth and price pressure, including commodities and cyclical stocks,” Bloomberg News reported. “At the same time, investors are riding a wave of speculative euphoria from penny stocks to bitcoin amid abundant policy support.”
The News
CRYPTO CRUSH: Signs continued to mount of greater mainstream acceptance of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
- Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy plans a new sale of $600 million of convertible notes and will use the net proceeds to buy more bitcoin.
- Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest lender, is exploring cryptocurrency custody, with aspirations to offer high-touch services to hedge funds that invest in the asset class, CoinDesk’s Ian Allison reported Friday.
- Morgan Stanley’s $150 billion Counterpoint Global investment unit is considering placing a bet on bitcoin, according to a report by Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter.
- The city of Miami, following the lead of Mayor Francis Suarez, voted late last week to study the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for services or worker salaries while launching educational campaigns in English, Spanish and Creole.
VERGE SNAFU: Verge, a small cryptocurrency serving as a payments option on Pornhub, suffered a massive 560,000-block reorganization Monday, according to researchers at Coin Metrics.
- The past 200 days of Verge transaction history “just vanished,” wrote Coin Metrics network data analyst Lucas Nuzzi. He described the event as “likely the deepest reorg that has ever taken place in a ‘top 100’ cryptocurrency.”
- Verge’s official Twitter account said the “dev team has released a fix,” and everything should be “business as usual” in “13 hours,” CoinDesk’s Zack Voell reported.
- The cryptocurrency previously known as DogecoinDark is no stranger to network attacks. It suffered similar but less severe exploits in April 2018 and May 2018.
Market Moves
Nouveau riche emerge as crypto market cap tops $1.5 trillion
The market value of all cryptocurrencies has topped $1.5 trillion for the first time, and it’s interesting to note just how much of that growth has been fueled by speculation over which projects might be the most promising – rather than just the pumping of also-ran tokens that dominated the industry’s top ranks in recent years.
Sure, the industry leaders bitcoin and Etherum’s ether still dominate the charts, representing roughly $1.1 trillion of the total. But the top 10 tokens now include cardano (ADA), polkadot (DOT), Binance coin (BNB) and chainlink (LINK) – all associated with projects perceived as having at least some claim on helping to create the future of finance.
They’re crypto’s nouveau riche, climbing in the industry hierarchy at the expense of…
Read More:Bitcoin Tops $50K and Crypto’s Nouveau Riche Move In – CoinDesk
