Bitcoin surges, hitting $5,000 for the first time this year

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Bitcoin has been in a lull in recent months. The largest cryptocurrency’s price kept declining throughout 2018, finally finding a bottom at roughly $3,200 last December. Since then, it’s been a slow and shaky climb upwards. 

On Tuesday, however, the price of Bitcoin surged more than 15% in less than an hour. The price briefly surpassed $5,000 on some exchanges, but is now slowly declining and currently sits at $4680, according to CoinMarketCap. 

Bitcoin’s price is known to be volatile, but this surge is notable as Bitcoin hasn’t come close to $5,000 since November 2018. Furthermore, the sudden rise brings back memories of 2017, when such enormous price increases were nothing out of the ordinary. 

The reasons behind the price increase, as is often the case with Bitcoin, are hard to discern. The entire cryptocurrency space has steadily been making progress throughout 2018 and 2019 despite the negative price movement, but there haven’t been any major new developments around Bitcoin that would prompt such a quick price jump. Notably, even Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, appeared stumped by the price surge as well. 

In fact, recent news has been fairly negative. A recent report by crypto index fund Bitwise had found that 95 percent of Bitcoin trading volume is fake. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delayed a decision on two possible Bitcoin ETF listings last week. And crypto exchange Bithumb was hacked to the tune of $13 million just last week. 

The prices of other major cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, XRP, EOS and Litecoin, all jumped considerably, though not as much as Bitcoin. The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies currently stands at $158 billion. 

Disclosure: The author of this text owns, or has recently owned, a number of cryptocurrencies, including BTC and ETH.