The price of Bitcoin (BTC) has broken past $50,000 per coin for the first time since December 2021.
Coinbase data shows that the largest digital asset by market cap hit the $50,000 mark at 11 a.m. Eastern Time (5 p.m. Central European Time) on Monday.
The asset, which this time last year was priced at less than $22,000, is up by more than 15% over the past seven days. Over the past month, it has risen by 16%.
BTC looked like it was having a slow year after the approval of several long-awaited exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January.
The investment vehicles got the green light from the Securities and Exchange Commission after a decade of denials, but the price of Bitcoin dipped. This was down to one of the biggest fund managers, Grayscale, selling coins after investors wanted to redeem their shares. That pressure seems to have eased now, though, and money is flooding back into the space.
BTC's rise, according to analysts, is down to big investors hoarding the cryptocurrency and a renewed interest from Wall Street in the tech industry.
The tech-heavily Nasdaq today is up 0.34% today; BTC previously was heavily correlated to stocks.
Bitcoin touched its all-time high of $69,044 back in November 2021, during the last bull run. At the time, the global cryptocurrency market capitalization briefly surpassed $3 trillion. At the time of writing, the global market cap is sitting at $1.9 trillion.
Since last week, analysts have been saying that onchain data points to Bitcoin likely making a big climb. All this comes ahead of the Bitcoin halving in April, which will see the rewards paid out to Bitcoin miners reduced from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.