Bitcoin Briefly Trades Above $50,000 As Investors Await Another Surge

While stock traders in the US and China took a break from trading thanks to national holidays, attention turned to Bitcoin’s flirtation with $50,000. Overnight, BTC briefly reached the mark, before easing back. 

The news came during Asia trading hours, as investors have been accruing capital in anticipation of the price movement. 

The trend was spotted by CryptoQuant CEO Ki-Young Ju who noted on Twitter that reserves in stablecoins had been building steadily on exchanges. 

This trend, said Ju was typical of traders who would hold their crypto in dollar-pegged tokens and wait for the right buying conditions. 

Whether Bitcoin goes back above $50k appears to be a foregone conclusion, the question being posed by traders is: how much further can BTC go? 

This bullish trend has helped broader crypto markets recover from Monday’s losses. Global market cap is now back above $1.5 trillion. Fun fact: In less than eight weeks, crypto has added $1 trillion to its total value. 

Ethereum clawed back over half its losses, to hover just below $1,800, while other projects went further including Polkadot (up 8%), Cardano (up 4.5%) and Cosmos (up 24.9%). 

But just as crypto appears to have clawed its way out of the mire of its earlier days, two stories cropped up to remind us that there is still an element of the wild west left in crypto’s day to day dealings. 

The first involved Verge Token. The project, favoured as a means of payment for performers on adult site Pornhub appears to have lost 200 days worth of transactions, suggesting it had suffered a 51% attack.

The second is Chainalysis’ Crypto Crime Report - which highlighted crypto’s seedier underbelly made off with more than $2 billion in ill gotten gains last year.  

Futures Markets Up Overnight but Investors Are Expecting Pullbacks

Markets were closed in the US yesterday, but futures markets continued to rise. Dow Jones futures rose 0.8%, S&P 500 futures climbed 0.7% and Nasdaq 100 futures advanced 0.7%.

Chinese markets were also closed thanks to the Lunar New Year celebrations, but other exchanges in Asia and Europe were open, and following America's bullish lead. 

Yesterday, Europe’s Stoxx 600 index rose 1.3 per cent and the UK’s FTSE 100 index was up by 2.5 per cent. The news that the UK hit its deadline for offering coronavirus jabs to those over 70 and frontline health workers — 15m people out of a population of 67m — also helped push sterling up to $1.39, its highest level for almost three years.

But all this good news is being met with caution that growth is going to become patchier as stocks start to stretch beyond their valuations.