Bitcoin Toys With $60k, BNB Hits All-Time High and Ethereum Creeps Past $2,000

It’s all systems go for the crypto market. 

Binance Coin hit a new all-time high of $356 at 2 AM, and little more than an hour later, Bitcoin also hit highs of $60,200. By then, Ethereum also crossed $2,000, a hair’s breadth from its ATH $2,036 on February 20. 

Bitcoin trades at $59,950 at the time of writing, while Ethereum goes for $2,011. 

The coins are hot in demand. The average transaction fee Ethereum—an indication of activity on the Ethereum blockchain—increased from $13 on Monday to $22 today.

Institutional and retail interest is high

And after a few weeks of relative quiet, institutional interest in Bitcoin is picking back up . Yesterday, banking giant JP Morgan said that Bitcoin’s volatility is declining, making it more attractive as a store of value and as an investment to institutions. 

In a note on Thursday, the bank explained that if Bitcoin’s volatility was set to converge with the volatility of gold, the data  supports a price projection of $130,000. JP Morgan’s projection doesn’t come entirely out of the blue. Earlier this year JP Morgan quantitative strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said that $146,000 “should be considered as a long-term target.”

Plus, according to documents that Morgan Stanley filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday morning, Morgan Stanley is falling deeper down the crypto rabbit hole. It plans to increase clients’ exposure to Bitcoin by enabling certain mutual funds to invest in cash-settled Bitcoin futures contracts and the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, a publicly-traded closed-end fund devoted to Bitcoin. 

Like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley’s interest in Bitcoin is not sudden. At the beginning of this year it bought a 10% share in MicroStrategy, a cloud computing company that’s hoarded $4.5 billion in Bitcoin over the last year. 

Doge is down. Paris is up. 

Not everything went smoothly. Dogecoin took a big hit to its price today. It is down almost 8% to trade at a price of $0.059. The price briefly pumped over April Fool’s day when Elon Musk tweeted that “SpaceX is going to put a literal dogecoin on the literal moon.”

Shortly after Musk’s tweet the price jumped from $0.053 to $0.07, surging by almost 32%, but it has since beat a retreat. Clearly the “Elon Musk Effect” is losing its bark. 

Lastly, Paris Hilton rejoined the crypto world with a big announcement. In summer last year, the hotel heiress and socialite sold her artwork as a non-fungible token for $17,000. Now she’s back at it again.

Hilton appeared on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” to talk about her upcoming NFT business, the details of which she remained tight-lipped about, but hinted that one of the NFTs will be art and the other will be “music and memorabilia.” She also opened up about her portfolio as an investor and said she owns Bitcoin and is backing several female entrepreneurs. 

Never a dull day in crypto, eh?