Bitcoin hits $60,000 as rally snowballs
By Amanda Cooper
LONDON (Reuters) -Bitcoin hit $60,000 on Wednesday for the first time in more than two years, as a surge of capital into new U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded products fuelled a rally that has reached 42% this month, on track for its largest monthly gain since December 2020.
Bitcoin was last up 8% at $61,272, its highest since November 2021, when it hit a record just below $70,000. It was also heading for its largest weekly gain in a year, up 18.5% since Feb. 21.
Traders have poured into bitcoin ahead of April's halving event — a process designed to slow the release of the cryptocurrency. In addition, the prospect of the Federal Reserve delivering a series of rate cuts this year has fed investor appetite for higher-yielding or more volatile assets.
«Bitcoin is being driven by the support of consistent inflows into the new spot ETFs and outlook for April's halving event and June's Fed interest rate cuts,» said Ben Laidler, global markets strategist at retail investment platform eToro.
Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) Global, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, said on Wednesday it was investigating an issue causing some users to see zero balance across their accounts. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a separate post on X that the crypto exchange was dealing with a large surge in traffic.
The value of all the bitcoin in circulation has topped $2 trillion this month for the first time in two years, according to crypto platform CoinGecko, while the price of the token itself has doubled in just four months.
The bigger bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have seen a definite pickup in interest this week.
The three most popular, run by Grayscale, Fidelity and BlackRock (NYSE:BLK), have seen trading volumes surge.
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