Bitcoin’s price reversed Wednesday’s losses on Thursday. Traders and analysts, however, have largely kept a short-term bearish view because some are attributing gains in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to GameStop’s stock drama. Bitcoin trading around $32,607.78 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 3.17% over the previous 24 hours. BTC above its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a bullish signal for market technicians.
GameStop’s stock drama seems to be galvanizing not just stock markets but bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, many of which reversed their losses of just a day ago, similar to what happened in the U.S. equities market. The most notable winner was dogecoin (DOGE), which hit a new all-time high earlier Thursday.
Samuel Haig
For the first time since 2015, Dogecoin is once again gracing the list of top ten crypto assets by market cap. In less than two days, DOGE has surged 900% from $0.0078 to post a new all-time high of $0.078 — breaking its previous high of $0.0185 by more than four times.
As a result, the veteran meme-coin currently ranks as the seventh-largest crypto asset with a market cap of more than 9 billion, sitting above Chainlink and below Cardano. DOGE last traded for $0.073 at the time of writing.
The sudden DOGE parabola has been attributed to an organized pump carried out by members of the Reddit group r/WallStreetBets — who were found to have engineered the recent short-squeeze that triggered international lockdowns on the trade of video game retailer Gamestop’s shares.
Greg Thomson
When the richest man in the world Elon Musk updated his Twitter bio on Jan. 29 — simply adding the word ‘Bitcoin’ — it was followed by a near-immediate 13% increase to the Bitcoin spot price. Musk’s bio appeared to be updated on Friday morning, and was followed by a cryptic tweet that referred to the inevitability of... something.
Tweeted at 8:22 a.m. UTC, Musk’s 43 million followers apparently took notice. Some assumed the tweet was a reference to the Dogecoin (DOGE) price surge which was ignited by r/wallstreetbet traders as a follow-up to the recent Gamestop (GME) stock short-squeeze. Others assumed the tweet was related to Bitcoin.
Either way, at 8:24 a.m., Bitcoin suddenly took off. Over the course of the next 30 minutes, the value of Bitcoin increased by 13.9%, as the coin price climbed from a starting point of $32,194. By 9:04 a.m., the coin was worth $36,670, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Shortly afterward, BTC continued to climb, eventually hitting $37,420 — representing more than 20% growth in the previous 24 hours.
Joshua Mapperson
Digital asset manager Grayscale is showing little signs of slowing down its Bitcoin accumulation, adding around 40,000 BTC to its stash since January 13. That's around $1.36 billion worth of Bitcoin in just 16 days.
The dramatic accumulation was noted by Rafael Schultze-Kraft, the CTO of crypto analytics firm Glassnode, who noted that only 26,000 BTC have been mined into existence since the start of the year. That means Grayscale has purchased Bitcoin at a rate that is 54% faster than new BTC supply has been created during 2021 so far. However the vast majority was purchased in the last 16 days, meaning that for the past two weeks Grayscale has been buying around 170% more Bitcoin than was mined over the same period.
If it keeps buying at such high levels, Grayscale will have amassed 912,500 BTC, or roughly 5% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply, by the end of 2021.
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