Bitcoin Passes $46,000 Price Mark for First Time Since May Crash

The cryptocurrency market continues to break out of its summer slump, with Bitcoin's price topping $46,000 this morning—the first time the leading coin has topped that mark since May 16, when the market was in a downward spiral.

Bitcoin briefly rose above the $45,000 mark on Sunday before retreating, but surged past that mark again this morning and has thus far sustained it. As of this writing, the price of $45,945 is slightly off today’s peak, but only slightly so. CoinGecko’s chart shows a couple of pops above the $46,000 mark already today.

Bitcoin’s price rose steadily from October 2020 into early May of this year, blasting off from a price around $10,000 to an all-time high of nearly $64,805 on April 14, per CoinGecko. However, mid-May brought uncertainty to the market due in part to Tesla’s decision to stop accepting Bitcoin over environmental concerns, as well as China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency.

The wider crypto market tumbled following Tesla’s May 12 announcement, and Bitcoin ultimately lost more than half of its value, even falling below $30,000 on multiple occasions over the last month. Bitcoin is now up more than 15% over the last week and nearly 36% over the past 30 days, and much of the crypto market has followed suit on an upward trajectory.

Ethereum continued its own climb over the weekend, hitting the $3,000 mark early Saturday for the first time since May and popping up further since then. The current price of $3,164 is the highest seen since May 18, and represents a 24% seven-day gain in price for ETH, not to mention a nearly 47% climb over the last 30 days.

Although many of the top cryptocurrencies have seen double-digit percentage gains over the last week, Ethereum’s larger rise may have been facilitated by last week’s launch of the London hard fork, a network upgrade. The upgrade reworks how Ethereum calculates transaction fees, but also burns that fee, or removes that amount of ETH from circulation.

That deflationary element gradually limits the growth of ETH's total supply, potentially boosting the long-term value of the cryptocurrency. Already, more than 17,900 ETH ($56.5 million) has been burned since last Thursday’s network upgrade, and ETH’s price has been steadily climbing since the launch. Ethereum and the wider market saw a slight stumble overnight, but prices have quickly bounced back since.

Meanwhile, Dfinity’s Internet Computer (ICP) token continues to outperform the wider market, rising 18% over the last 24 hours to a current price of nearly $66. ICP is up 61% on the week, handily beating nearly every other top cryptocurrency on the mark. Internet Computer’s token is currently ranked 16th by market cap, according to CoinGecko. Only Ravencoin, ranked 92nd by market cap, has had a better week: it’s up nearly 70% to $0.107.