After a Monday morning rally that saw the price of Bitcoin shoot past $31,000, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap got a second wind hours later, surpassing $34,000 later in the day, according to data from CoinGecko.
The new benchmark set a record high for 2023, reaching values not seen since last May, triggered a torrent of BTC shorts, leading to $114 million in liquidation in the last hour—and $145 million in total across crypto assets, according to analytics firm CoinGlass.
Image: Coinglass
On leading crypto exchange Coinbase, BTC was trading at a premium closer to $35,000.
The pair of rallies to start the week have been attributed to building anticipation over the pending approval of Bitcoin spot ETF applications by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Earlier today, a Washington, D.C. judge officially ordered the SEC to take another look at a long-delayed and litigated spot Bitcoin ETF application from Grayscale, after the regulatory agency failed to respond to an earlier court inquiry.
Also today, global investment giant BlackRock updated its own application to note that it had started to take the preliminary steps needed to launch its Bitcoin spot ETF, including allocating funds and securing a ticker symbol. The moves don't guarantee an approval is coming, but they suggest confidence the SEC will eventually do so.
Crypto analysts are saying that both price spikes have pierced market resistance thresholds at $31,000 and $34,000 respectively, a bullish sign. Popular Crypto Twitter commentator Rekt Capital says the price action is likely to disprove the "Bearish Bitcoin Fractal," a pricing model that assumes price could rally to record highs before additional downside pulls it back down.
Crypto dark markets have rebounded weeks after Telegram shut down the world's largest illicit marketplace, with successor platforms processing equal volumes, amounting to roughly $27 billion.
Elliptic reported Monday that Tudou Guarantee marketplace has captured most of the transaction volume from Huione Guarantee, which Telegram banned on May 13 following the blockchain analytics firm's investigation.
The report shows how Huione Guarantee's activity collapsed to zero immediately after May 11,...
The wildest clips from Iran's bombing attacks weren't captured by Pentagon cameras or CNN crews. They were cooked up by Google's AI video maker.
After Iran's missile barrage against Israel earlier in the week, fake AI videos started spreading like a nasty rumor, showing Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport supposedly getting hammered.
The scenes were highly realistic, and though the strikes were real, the videos going viral all over the internet were not, according to forensic firms.
This is the stat...
Midnight Network, a privacy and data protection blockchain with connections to Cardano, will offer NIGHT tokens to users of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and other major networks as part of its launch airdrop.
The protocol revealed its two-token system and “Glacier Drop”—a multi-phase token distribution event—plans in a 45-page tokenomics white paper on Monday.
“Traditional tokenomic models rely on a single token and require users to spend tokens for every transaction, creating economic uncertain...