Bitcoin rose to an all-time high of $63,246 ahead of the scheduled April 14 public listing of Coinbase on the Nasdaq, breaking a previous BTC record of more than $62,000 in March.
Coinbase’s debut on the stock market at a valuation of about $100 billion is a powerful sign of Wall Street’s growing acceptance of cryptocurrencies, Bloomberg reported. Skeptics still see a bust in the latest boom, even as a growing list of companies embrace Bitcoin. Some investors see bitcoin as a hedge against inflation — a way to store money as prices rise.
The largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. by trading volume, Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. It claims to make it easy to buy, sell, and store cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. It has 56 million verified users and reported $1.8 billion in revenue for Q1 2021.
Professional investors are among those who still see Bitcoin as a bubble, according to almost three quarters of the respondents in the April Bank of America Fund Manager Survey — a closely watched market gauge. The results come from a survey of 200 panelists with $533 billion in assets under management, CNBC reported.
About 74 percent of those who responded to the survey said they see Bitcoin as a bubble, compared to 16 percent who said it wasn’t a bubble.
It isn’t just just retail investors who are buying the world’s No. 1 cryptocurrency, Motley Fool reported. Three publicly traded companies collectively bought $3.9 billion worth of Bitcoin since the summer of 2020.
Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors bought $1.5 billion worth, business-intelligence software company MicroStrategy bought $2.19 billion worth and digital payments company Square bought $220 million worth.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley announced that they will offer clients access to crypto investments.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 74: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin returns for a new season of the GHOGH podcast to discuss Bitcoin, bubbles, and Biden. He talks about the risk factors for Bitcoin as an investment asset including origin risk, speculative market structure, regulatory, and environment. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble?
Many analyst expect the Bitcoin rally to continue, Bloomberg reported.
“The lowest 30-day volatility since October tells us Bitcoin is ripe to exit its cage and continue in a bull-market on its way to the next $10,000 move,” according to Mike McGlone, Bloomberg Intelligence commodities strategist. “Similar to Tesla’s equity-wealth allocation to Bitcoin, the Coinbase IPO may add to the growing list of 2021 crypto-validation milestones.”
Institutions are buying more bitcoin per month than what’s being mined, and there just isn’t enough for everyone, Muyao Shen wrote for Coindesk. Glassnode, an analysis firm that tracks blockchain data, reported a pattern that suggests an ever-decreasing supply of bitcoin available to buy and sell could lead to a price surge as more institutional investors embrace Bitcoin.
