Bitcoin rallies 5 percent as crypto markets surge

Bitcoin is up 5 percent on the day, as the number one cryptocurrency by market capitalization gained over $6 billion in market cap to reach its current valuation of $155 billion.

Despite today's long-awaited break to the upside, the price of Bitcoin is still down over 22 percent from the currencies early-September high $10,800. But after losing almost a third of its value to hit a low of $7,800 on September 30, Bitcoin has since surged over 10 percent in the last 2 days to its current price of $8,640.

With the decentralized cryptocurrency now back again above its symbolic $150 billion valuation, the rest of the crypto markets did not disappoint either. Large-cap projects like Binance Coin and Ethereum have also boosted their prices by 6 percent and 10 percent—with a couple of small-cap altcoins also pumping over 20 percent on the day.

Bitcoin's rally of nearly $500 in two hours saw over $55 million worth of short trading positions liquidated on the BitMEX futures exchange. This figure represented around 7 percent of the Bitcoin vs U.S.-dollar market's $770 million worth of open-interest (total value of all open trades). Despite the drop in open interest, trading volume has doubled in the last couple of hours, with 24-hour trading volume shooting up from $1.6 billion to its current level of $3.3 billion at the number one Bitcoin futures exchange.

With Bitcoin now back up to a 15-day high, and its recent pattern of successively lower highs now broken, surely the next target for the bulls will be the infamous $9,000 Vegeta resistance level—it's only another 5 percent pump from here.