Bitcoin threatens price rally after blowing past $47k

Bitcoin nearly hit $48,000 on Friday morning to almost double in price over the past year.

BTC was again at its highest point since just after spot ETFs opened on US exchanges about one month ago, which represented two-year highs.

The top crypto briefly skirted $49,000 on Jan. 11 before retracing more than 20% over the following fortnight.

Bitcoin’s market cap is almost $900 billion, pushing the paper value of all cryptocurrencies past $1.87 trillion, per CoinGecko. At time of writing, bitcoin was back around $47,000. 

Read more: Let’s pour one out for the first-day spot bitcoin ETF investors

Crypto, at least right now, is at its highest valuation since May 2022, when Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin went kaput and dragged digital assets into their longest bear market on record, by at least one metric.

Crypto’s total market value is still just over half what it was during its November 2021 record. 

Bitcoin briefly traded for $69,000 at the time, so it needs a further 45% rally to retest all-time highs.

Analysts have suggested that bitcoin’s price was being kept down by miners selling parts of their treasuries, perhaps bolstering their balance sheets before the halving slashes block rewards in late April.

The billions of dollars in bitcoin flowing out of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) since spot ETFs launched were also suspected to have played a role in lower prices. 

Those outflows have largely been stemmed of late and the ETFs overall are again net buyers of bitcoin. 

Without counting GBTC, funds from BlackRock, Fidelity, Bitwise and others now hold more than $8 billion in bitcoin. GBTC meanwhile contains $20 billion in bitcoin, down from about $29 billion at the end of last year.

Genesis, the crypto lender which went bankrupt last year, is however posturing to soon offload more than $1.3 billion in GBTC stock.

Markets outside of crypto are also fired up. Benchmark indexes including the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are flirting with records, having jumped more than 5% and 7% respectively year to date.

Bitcoin has now easily outperformed major tech stocks Microsoft and Apple over the past year, while ether is close to overtaking the former thanks to its own rally alongside BTC.

Solana has them all beat with more than 350% gains, largely due to an ongoing recovery post-Sam Bankman-Fried.

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