It's a very merry Christmas for Bitcoin holders, as the cryptocurrency surged to a new all-time high on Christmas Day.
→The price of Bitcoin shot up by 5.8% in the past 24 hours, peaking at $24,644.30 according to CoinGecko.
Bitcoin's price has pulled back slightly; it's currently trading at around $24,358, at time of writing.
It follows a week in which Bitcoin has plowed through previous records, reaching $24,085 on December 19.
Growing demand for Bitcoin is resulting in a supply crisis, as institutional investors are buying up huge quantities of the cryptocurrency; in the last week, business intelligence firm MicroStrategy added to its Bitcoin holdings with a $650 million buy, bringing its total to over 70,000 Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy has purchased an additional 29,646 bitcoins for $650 million at an average price of $21,925 per #bitcoin and now #hodl an aggregate of 70,470 bitcoins purchased for $1.125 billion at an average price of $15,964 per bitcoin.https://t.co/j6wVLXIzoa
— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) December 21, 2020
At the same time, the supply of Bitcoin held on exchanges has dropped by 20% since January as it's moved into long term storage by hodlers, meaning that there's less available to trade.
“The supply crisis as I call it, will have an impact on price, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent retail investors or smaller investors from getting into the space,” Glassnode CTO Rafael Schultze-Kraft told Decrypt.