The price of Bitcoin (BTC) has shot up today, reaching $9,330, after weeks of bearish price action. The coin rose $100 in 30 minutes in a sudden spike.
The price surge liquidated $23 million of shorts—people betting the price of Bitcoin would go down—on futures trading platform BitMEX. According to datamish, 192 traders have swapped their trading positions from short to long, betting that the price of Bitcoin will go up.
Bitcoin's price has been unusually flat for around two months now. After crossing the $10,000 mark on June 2, it slowly slid to the low $9,000s, where it has sat for 10 days.
With today's sudden spike, Bitcoin's market cap has jumped up too, rising to $171 billion. And Bitcoin's market dominance has rebounded slightly to 62.4%—despite a recent downtrend.
Bitcoin's trading volumes are also bouncing back somewhat. While trading volumes had fallen to as low $12 billion three days ago, they have bounced back up to $16 billion.
Other coins are faring well, with the price of Ethereum (ETH) up 2.1%, Litecoin (LTC) 3.2% and Monero (XMR) 3.3%. Some coins are in the red, with Chainlink (LINK) down 4% and Stellar (XLM) down 2.2%.
Over $2.6 trillion of value has been sent on the Bitcoin blockchain since inception.
— Dan Held (@danheld) July 20, 2020
Bitcoin's price action comes not long after the network reached a small milestone. According to Dan Held, director of business development at crypto exchange Kraken, the Bitcoin network has now sent $2.6 trillion of value since it was created. That's based on the amount of Bitcoin moved in each transaction based on the approximate price at the time. Doing the math, that comes to $236 billion per year on average. Not bad for rat poison.