Bitcoin’s price soared to more than $ 50,000 on Tuesday, February 16, galvanized by interest from big banks, companies like Tesla and investors with keen risk appetites.
Around 12:35 GMT (13:35 in Paris), bitcoin climbed to $ 50,547.70, a historic high.
It then fell to cost around 13:35 GMT 49,130.50 dollars, up 1.9% on the session and nearly 70% since the start of the year.
After a dizzying performance in 2020, bitcoin has seen its value quintuple in the past year. With more than 18.6 million bitcoins issued since its inception by anonymous in 2008, the entire market is theoretically worth over $ 923 billion.
If some market observers are wary of the volatility of this decentralized market which is not based on any assets, others believe that the situation is very different from 2017, when prices had climbed with even more vigor before falling. crash in early 2018.
“The growing interest of the business community in cryptocurrencies has transformed the market compared to 2017,” comments Neil Wilson, analyst at Markets.com.
Last week, electric automaker Tesla surprised by announcing that it had invested $ 1.5 billion of its cash in bitcoin.
The boss of Tesla and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, does not hesitate to praise the merits of cryptocurrencies on social networks.
“Democratization”
On Tuesday, the MicroStrategy group, a mid-sized American software publisher that made the bet at the end of 2020 to invest heavily in bitcoin, to allow Wall Street investors to bet on cryptocurrency by buying their stock, announced a lifting of funds of $ 600 million “to buy bitcoins”.
In addition, banking and financial groups are increasingly interested in bitcoin: the oldest bank on Wall Street BNY Mellon and MasterCard followed the example last week of the giant BlackRock or the payment service Paypal, which announced new cryptocurrency projects in recent months.
“The approval of a bitcoin index fund traded on an exchange in Canada fuels hopes,” adds Timo Emden, a cryptocurrency analyst based in Germany, who judges that if a similar financial product were approved in the United States, it would be proof of a total “democratization” of cryptocurrencies.
However, the cryptocurrency market is not unanimous: several central bankers have rejected the idea of considering bitcoin as a currency in its own right.
Central banks versus crypto
“I don’t think digital currencies as they were originally designed” meet the criteria “for governance of a sustainable digital currency,” Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said in late January.
However, the monetary policy of central banks benefits cryptocurrencies. In an attempt to prevent the economic collapse promised by the Covid-19 pandemic, institutions have adopted very low or negative rates and are flooding the market with liquidity, which is pushing investors towards the riskiest assets.
And for some, since bitcoin depends on a decentralized network and can never be influenced by monetary policy in the same way as the euro or the dollar, it is the perfect investment to guard against inflation.
For others, buying bitcoin is simply “a fear of missing the train,” said Naeem Aslam, analyst at Ava Trade.
