● Bitcoin Hits new All-Time High
● Guggenheim eyes massive investment into BTC
● ETH Back Above $600, Ethereum 2.0 Launched
Welcome to this week’s edition of Overbit News. We start this week’s issue off with words not said in nearly three years — Bitcoin (BTCUSD) has hit a new all-time high.
Bitcoin has had extreme growth over the past year, mostly going straight up ever since the Covid dip in March below $4,000. At the time of writing, BTCUSD stands at $19,587, nearly 5x from the bottom nine months ago. Despite these vast gains, breaking the all-time high was a bit anticlimactic, at least on BitStamp, where it hit a new high at $19,864.15 – only breaking the all-time high by a few dollars.
This new high was without much festivities, markedly different from 2017 high when there was an entire media frenzy surrounding anything and everything about cryptocurrency. If we had to guess, this means that very few people in the retail space are driving this price action. Instead, it’s the numerous institutions that have gotten involved since then: Paypal, Square, and Fidelity to say the last. One would wonder where this rally for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will end up once the world catches wind again.
Speaking of institutional investors, that brings us to our second story of the day. Once again, we are greeted with news of a large institution with interest in getting into the Bitcoin space. This time, it’s one with quite a large wallet.
A Wall Street firm named Guggenheim Partners recently revealed in new regulatory filings that they reserve the right to invest 10% of their net value into Bitcoin, specifically the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. With $5.3 billion under assets, their investment would total nearly $530 million at the full 10%. There is a caveat, though. According to BusinessInsider, “The firm added that, though it could gain exposure to Bitcoin through the Grayscale trust, it had no other plans to invest directly or indirectly in cryptocurrencies.”. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just not a ringing endorsement of cryptocurrency like some other investments offer. At this rate, investments like these might not even be news one day.
Wrapping up this week’s edition of Overbit News, we’re going to cover Ethereum and the upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 and the market related to it. As we’re watching the charts, we see ETH/USD back above $600, after dipping below $500 during a violent drop.
This backdrop to ETH/USD is Ethereum 2.0, which launched on December 1st. The first phase (Phase 0) of the long-awaited Ethereum upgrade will launch with the Beacon Chain deployment and will be sure to push Ethereum into the limelight even Bitcoin, the king of the show.
We see Ethereum with a nearly $70billion market cap, representing 12% of the entire market cap of crypto. Ethereum will switch from POW to POS with this upgrade, and with ETH’s massive head start over all other smart-contract platforms, one could make the argument that Ethereum will be valid, and growing for years and years to come.
It’s easy to see that things are rapidly evolving in the cryptocurrency space, so whether you are researching trading strategies, making cryptocurrency price predictions, or just a casual trader, Overbit.com has the tools and resources necessary to help you expand and grow.