Bitcoin Booms Under COVID As Investors Flee Wall Street

By Matt Hussey

The Bitcoin praise train keeps on chugging today, as a new report suggests the global pandemic has been a boon for BTC, and a blight for everything else. 

Grayscale, the world’s largest crypto asset manager published a survey looking at the attitudes of investors who have bought cryptocurrencies. While most of the report stated the obvious: young, college-educated men with an interest in financial news were the most likely to invest there was one telling piece of data that has excited many. 

Of its respondents who had invested in Bitcoin, Grayscale Found that 63% of Bitcoin investors said that the coronavirus pandemic impacted their decision to invest, and 39% said that the pandemic made Bitcoin more appealing. 

The survey showed that investors aged 35-44, whom Grayscale noted have “already navigated three recessions and has seen traditional defensive instruments, such as real estate, defensive stocks, and bonds, lose their appeal as hedges against market downturns,” considered that Bitcoin would be a safe haven. 

And what a safe haven it has been - if you leave out the crash in March. The price in November 2019 hovered stubbornly below the $10,000 mark, today it’s sailed past $13,000 on its way to $14,000. 

In the last 24 hours, Bitcoin’s price is up 4.34% making it the best performer of all projects in the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap. 

Monero meanwhile, which had previously been enjoying a rally in its price took a tumble last night as someone hacked into Donald Trump’s website and attempted to solicit donations using, yep, you guessed it Monero. 

In the hijacking, the culprits wanted people to vote with their Monero on whether sensitive information involving El Presidente should be revealed, just as voters are heading to the polls.  

The votes are in, but we’re yet to see a verdict. 

Bad news bears stalk Wall Street 

Over in the fiat markets, it was another bad day for investors as the number of COVID cases continued to rise and earnings season failed to brighten prospects.  

The S&P, Dow and Nasdaq futures markets are all down, making it a third straight day of losses.  

As we mentioned before, this is one of the biggest weeks for earnings with hundreds of big companies issuing third-quarter reports. As of yesterday around a third of the companies making up the S&P 500s market cap had released their numbers. 

While overall, some 16% of reports came at the top end of what was expected, most market watchers are predicting that stocks overall will be down 20% compared to last year. 

It’s not surprising then to see Bitcoin creeping back on to major news broadcasters market roundups as it continues to outperform other asset classes. 

Is this the year Bitcoin finally goes mainstream and stays there? Who knows.

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