For the first time in more than three months, bitcoin returned to $50,000 .
On Sunday evening, bitcoin rebounded to the $50,000 level, a significant price level as the crypto market continues to recover from its spring crisis and subsequent summer slump.
The market capitalization of the world’s largest cryptocurrency has now reached $50,000. According to CoinGecko, it is up 2.6 percent in the last 24 hours, 5.6 percent in the last week, and 55 percent in the last month.
Bitcoin recently reached $50,000 in mid-May, shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that his business would stop accepting Bitcoin as payment for its vehicles owing to environmental concerns. This announcement, coupled with a Chinese crackdown, sent Bitcoin plunging in the days and weeks that followed.
Musk’s 180-degree flip startled investors, as Tesla had just three months prior purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, boosting investor confidence among institutional and retail investors.
The harm was aggravated further the following week, when the Chinese government pledged — and then implemented — a crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trade.
The broader cryptocurrency market tends to follow Bitcoin’s price changes, and all major cryptocurrencies immediately began to fall in response to the bad news.
Bitcoin has lost more than half of its value in the last several months, dropping below $30,000 on multiple occasions. However, a significant portion of the loss has been gradually recouped, and the rest of the market has followed suit.
As is the case with all round figures with a large number of zeros, many traders view $50,000 as a psychological barometer of success. Breaching it opens the door to more tidy sums, such as $55,000 or $60,000.
When the price fell below $50,000 for the first time on April 23, the trading team at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken informed Decrypt that they noticed “significant” selling by Kraken traders. The decline corresponded with Vice President Biden’s proposal to increase the capital gains tax in the United States.
“While it’s tempting to look at the news cycle,” Jonathon Miller, Kraken’s managing director for Australia, said at the time, “it seems more probable that the technical and psychological importance of the $50,000 level is most relevant.”
Is a return to $60,000 in the horizon? On April 14, Bitcoin reached an all-time high of nearly $65,000.
