Heightened trading on Friday has triggered bitcoin price to hit $8,040, a new all-time high.
Bitcoin’s week of resurgence continues as trading (on Bitfinex) climbed above $8,000 for the first time in history. The figure represents a gain of 700% this year and over 10% gain since Thursday’s opening.
At press time, bitcoin price is trading just above $7,840, after peaking to it a record high of $8,040 in the early hours of Friday (UTC).
Remarkably, the robust advance toward the new record high comes after prices fell below $5,500 during the weekend following the cancellation of the Segwit2x hard fork, triggering a monumental sell-off that saw investors switch to Bitcoin Cash, an offshoot of Bitcoin, that scaled its own record high. The pullback reversed as Bitcoin price made marked gains to trade above $6,500 on Monday, hinting at the momentum that has since stuck throughout the week leading to today’s new historic high.
Spencer Bogart, head of Blockchain Capital and a highly regarded analyst, speculates that today’s spike could be driven by “a resurgence in interest and viability” for the SegWit2x hard fork.
“Despite the fact that it was called off, there is still some group of people that will follow through with the intended fork,” he told Bloomberg Quint. “As a result, I believe some capital is rotating out of other crypto-assets and into bitcoin to make sure they receive coins on both sides of the fork.”
It remains to be seen if the theory has legs but a significant factor behind November’s gains is a market that is increasingly confident of new participation by institutional investors after CME Group, the world’s largest exchange owner, announced plans to adopt bitcoin as a financial instrument. CME chief Terry Duffy confirmed the launch bitcoin futures trading during the second week of December (less than a month away). Soon after, London-based Man Group, a $100 billion hedge fund, revealed its own plans to support bitcoin, buoyed by CME’s upcoming launch.