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Published 19:58 IST, December 17th 2020

Bitcoin trades above $20,000 for first time to hit all-time high, surges 250% in a year

Chief executive officer of crypto market data provider CryptoCompare, Charles Hayter said that sudden surge in the value of bitcoin is due to the domino effect.

Reported by: Zaini Majeed
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On December 16, the price of the Bitcoin trading reached a record high, hitting the $20,000 mark at 8:44 a.m. EST as it surpassed that value by almost 12 percent sitting at $21,786.06 as of 9:14 p.m over the last 24 hours. The $20,000 level has been unattainable for the bitcoin that managed to elevate to a longstanding high of $19,783.06 as of Jan. 1, 2017, as its highest value. According to CNBC, the surging price of the bitcoin can be attributed to the investors such as Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller and tech firms like Square Inc. and MicroStrategy Inc that have been purchasing the cryptocurrency for a long time. 

Chief executive officer of crypto market data provider CryptoCompare, Charles Hayter, told CNBC that the sudden surge in the value of bitcoin is due to the domino effect as asset managers tumble their portfolios into bitcoin. Institutional investors are attributed with the phenomenal growth of the cryptocurrency as people are now seeing the currency as an investment asset,  Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica told Silicon Angle.

Meanwhile, the chief investment officer at Guggenheim told Bloomberg TV that the bitcoin should be worth 20 times its current price. The fundamental work shows that bitcoin should be worth about $400,000, he said, adding, investors were now speculating how high the bitcoin’s value can reach. According to Crypto Potato, investor Guggenheim had filed an application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to purchase close to $500 million in bitcoin for its Macro Opportunities Fund in the month of November. 

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Investors' 'focus shift'

Co-founder and managing partner of Nexo, a crypto lender, Antoni Trenchev told Bloomberg in an interview that the investor focus has now steered to focus shifts to the next round number of $30,000 and it undoubtedly marked a new chapter for the cryptocurrency. He added that the narrative the media and retail crowd can properly latch onto because they’ve been noticeably absent from this rally. A market data from Coin Metrics declared that the currency traded 5.6 percent higher after major Wall Street firms like S&P Global and Cboe Global Markets have been trading in the currency. 

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Updated 19:56 IST, December 17th 2020

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