Bitcoin’s price is surging. What happens next?
crypto-crowd—before slipping back a little. The record capped a remarkable comeback from the dark days of November 2022, when interest-rate rises were crushing risk appetite and ftx, a crypto exchange, had just gone bust. At the time, buying bitcoin on such exchanges seemed like little more than a fun and novel way to get robbed.
Bitcoin is hardly rallying in isolation: everything is going up. Stockmarkets all over the world are near record highs. So are gold prices.
Even bond prices are climbing after a miserable two-year stretch. The catalyst is a combination of artificial-intelligence hype, joy at the state of the global economy and expectations of looser monetary policy to come. Still, bitcoin is doing better than most assets.
On January 10th the Securities and Exchange Commission, an American regulator, approved applications by ten investment firms, including BlackRock and Fidelity, to create bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These make it easier for everyday investors to buy the cryptocurrency. Rather than setting up an account with a specialist exchange, creating a crypto wallet, making a bank transfer and then finally buying bitcoin, people can now simply log on to their brokerage accounts and purchase an etf.
Assets in the ten largest bitcoin etfs now come to around $50bn. And the activity appears to be self-reinforcing: the more money is poured in, the higher the price goes, the more people chatter about bitcoin etfs, the more money pours in and so on and so on. Bitcoin has been in existence for 14 years.
Read more on livemint.com
