After staying under solid pressure over the last weekend, Bitcoin (BTC) is once again back in action today. Bitcoin’s (BTC) price is up 7% as of writing this story and has currently inched above $48K levels. At press time, BTC is up 7.35% trading at $48,144 with a market cap of $897 billion.
This could possibly be a crucial break and occurs just at a time when the business intelligence firm MicroStrategy adds another $15 million worth of Bitcoins to its massive kitty. Its recent disclosure with the SEC shows that same.
MicroStrategy has purchased an additional ~328 bitcoins for ~$15.0 million in cash at an average price of ~$45,710 per #bitcoin. As of 3/1/2021, we #hodl ~90,859 bitcoins acquired for ~$2.186 billion at an average price of ~$24,063 per bitcoin. $MSTRhttps://t.co/fGH5KacsPI
— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) March 1, 2021
This is another announcement just within a week’s time after MicroStrategy announced its $1.2 billion BTC purchase a few days back. It purchased this massive amount of BTC through convertible notes.
As Bitcoin continues to gain strength, big financial institutions continue to warm up to the world’s largest cryptocurrency. In a major revelation, Citibank said that Bitcoin could become the global trade currency thereby replacing the U.S. Dollar. The banking giant noted:
“The entrance of institutional investors has sparked confidence in cryptocurrency but there are still persistent issues that could limit widespread adoption. For institutional investors, these include concerns over capital efficiency, insurance and custody, security, and ESG considerations from Bitcoin mining. Security issues with cryptocurrency do occur, but when compared to traditional payments, it performs better.”
Although Citibank has added that Bitcoin could face major hurdles with mainstream adoption, it is the first big financial institution to acknowledge that crypto performs better over traditional payments.
Bitcoin Fraud/Illicit Use Less than Traditional Currency
Lawmakers have unwarrantedly raised repeated concerns about Bitcoin’s use in the global financial ecosystem. Recently, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that they need to monitor BTC’s use for illicit activities. However, Mira Christanto, a researcher at Messari points out that Bitcoin’s use for illicit purposes is way less than the traditional currency.
Concerns about #Bitcoin illegal activity are way overblown. Only 0.3%
1. Credit card fraud is 13.5% of network activity (USA, 2016)
2. Bank illicit transactions 4.38% (Fed 2012-2016) pic.twitter.com/eu5nmfNIKO
— Mira Christanto (@asiahodl) March 1, 2021
Although BTC price has shown a recent surge, the BTC/stock correlation is still high that indicates a selling pressure on the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
The relationship between the price of #Bitcoin and traditional stocks remains higher than the historical norm. As we've noted in previous data studies, $BTC's rallies tend to be the most prominent when this correlation turns negative, as it did in December, 2020. pic.twitter.com/3TjuFSw0Tn
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) March 1, 2021
