Bitcoin price continues to surge, breaking records along the way. On Tuesday (May 9) of this week, bitcoin saw values surge above $1,700 for the first time in history.
At the time of writing on Tuesday afternoon, CoinDesk pegged bitcoin was worth $1,734.01, up 5.78 percent for the day, though down from a high of a whopping $1,747.06 earlier in the morning. The digital currency’s market cap stood at just about $28 billion with some 16.3 million in circulation.
Bitcoin’s value has grown 73.9 percent from $997 at the beginning of 2017 and a full 285 percent year on year.
The most recent rise, which really began to take off at the tail end of April, still has no readily apparent catalyst on the market. One hypothesis is that investor optimism is rising in response to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) decision to review its rejection of the Winklevoss bitcoin-based ETF.
It seems unlikely that the SEC will renege on its earlier decision.
Still, with growth like this, the “outrageous prediction” that bitcoin could hit $2,000 in 2017 doesn’t seem quite so out there. (To be fair, the exact circumstances around the price rise from Saxo’s report were far different.)
With the latest rise, exchanges have seen a dampening of the widened exchange spread trends over the past few weeks. Bitfinex saw trading about $50 higher than average, a significant decrease from recent $100 disparities.
But it’s not just bitcoin. Practically every cryptocurrency has seen an uptick in value in the last month — with the total cryptocurrency market cap growing from $27.8 billion to over $52 billion in just over 30 days.
Whether or not this growth represents a bubble looking to burst is an open question.
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