On December 16, 2020, the most popular cryptocurrency, bitcoin (BTC), revisited the USD 20,000 level after a bumpy three-year journey. Two months later, on February 16, 2021, BTC has entered the USD 50,000 zone for the first time in its history on signs of increasing demand. (Updated at 13:03 UTC with an announcement by MicroStrategy.)
At the time of writing (12:45 UTC), BTC trades at USD 50,032, correcting lower from its new all-time high of USD 50,350 reached today. The price is up by almost 5% in a day and 49% in a week. It rallied by 37% in a month and 403% in a year.
BTC price chart:
"In the institutional space, I expect this milestone and the recent Tesla investment to break the mold for many corporate copycats. A psychological barrier remains for the retail despite Bitcoin’s divisibility, but I reckon this will soon be dispelled too as cryptocurrencies edge closer to mass adoption,” Antoni Trenchev, Co-Founder and CEO of major crypto lender Nexo, said in an emailed comment. He predicted that BTC would hit USD 50,000 by end-of-year.
Meanwhile, one of the most bullish non-crypto companies, US-based software developer MicroStrategy announced today it once again intends to borrow up to USD 690m and spend it on BTC. At the end of January, the company owned approximately BTC 70,784 (currently USD 3.5bn).
Also, according to Adam Liposky, Ecosystem Operations Lead at Pocket Network, a blockchain data ecosystem for Web3 applications, this bull run "is illustrative of the widespread adoption of initial blockchain implementations, typified by Bitcoin and Ethereum."
"This is just the beginning," he said.
However, as reported, Philip Gradwell, Chief Economist at Chainalysis, said recently that this rally is due to an expectation of future mass adoption, rather than actual mass adoption today.
"People are trying to get in before this expected adoption and they are buying in a market with very constrained supply, so prices are climbing. If adoption materializes then this will be a good bet, but if it does not then the market could turn," he said.
Also, according to Mike McGlone, a commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, BTC volatility is likely to continue rising in the near term and remain elevated until it settles in around its next plateau. The strategist told Bloomberg that USD 100,000 per BTC "may be a longer term target."
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