A ray of sunshine has been injected into the Bitcoin, Ethereum price this week. It’s all thanks to, surprisingly, the American government. Congress is having hearings on virtual currencies this week and it turns out, they may be more open to them than many thought.
There has been a month-long slump in the crypto markets. Bad news after bad news continued to drive prices and markets down. For some, it was a very depressing open to a year where many thought that Bitcoin & Ethereum price would rise to unprecedented levels.
Then, the U.S. Congress scheduled hearings on virtual currencies to talk about how they might approach regulation or if prohibition was required. The heads of both the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had glowing things to say about blockchain technology. That sent Bitcoin & Ethereum price upward fast.
While things started to turn around yesterday, there was a small dip overnight. Then, again this morning, Bitcoin & Ethereum price started back upward. Bitcoin hit a high over over $8,500 today and is currently 13.68% higher over the last 24 hours. As for Ethereum, it peaked around $850, up from under $700. At present it’s sitting at 12% up for the past 24 hours. Bitcoin volume was up to almost $14B yesterday, and today already sits at $11B.
Other news is bolstering Bitcoin & Ethereum price. Some big altcoin news came out of the Litecoin corner as they were added to Aliant Payment Systems. Litecoin will most likely make up a majority of the smaller priced charges while Bitcoin is used for larger purchases. That news sent Litecoin price north of $150 after begin under $125.
The question is, now that those who make policy in the U.S. are openly interested in technological innovation over prohibition, will things continue to rise? That’s the question that’s on everyone’s mind. Already today, the rise is starting to even out and slow. However, looking at the top 100 cryptocurrencies based on market capitalization, there are only two that are down today; SingularityNet (AGI) and Tether. However, Tether was at $1.01 earlier and is now down to $0.999. Since it’s supposed to be worth roughly a dollar it’s small variations are barely noticeable. It’s down 0.22% today. AGI is down 3.65% by comparison.
Throughout 2018 Bitcoin was dropping to a point where it was going to start testing support levels. Many thought it couldn’t go under $10,000, but it did. Then it dropped down to $8,000 and many thought it couldn’t go below that, but it did. On Monday it dropped all the way to $6,756 and continued that trend to reach $6,048 before it finally was able to start climbing and closed at $7,754 for the day.
It appears that, at least for now, those who were calling $6K as the bottom were right. Today everyone holding crypto are hoping that the rise will continue and the market will turn toward another months-long bullish run.
