Seems like the bulls bring the main crypto asset back to life Velvet Follow May 14, 2019 · 3 min read

Bitcoin crossed the $8,000 border!

Now BTC is trading at $8,300. These figures represent a more than 37 percent increase in the past 7 days. Since reaching a 2018 price minimum of $3,112 on December 15, 2018, with a market cap of $56 billion at that time, the price of Bitcoin has grown by almost 150% and currently records a market capitalization of $136 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

Still doubting Bitcoin?

Usually when the market leader sets a strong rate, the USD value of the majority of other cryptocurrencies follows it.

All of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap are increasing in price today, the top-2 performers of which include BitcoinCash (BCH), and Dash (DASH) which currently reached a 24-hour growth of 12.6 each.

Crypto community and BTC fans are wondering why is that appears to happen. The key reasons are not new and can be easily explained.

Now let’s get into the reasons for such a good crypto assets performance.

Bitcoin has mining supply limit of 21 million coins. Around 4 million of those have not yet been mined while other 4 million are estimated to be lost forever. Hence, the circulating supply at the moment is closer to 13 million coins. Surely, there are and will always be people who will not sell coins at any price for some reasons. So the liquidity of this market is quite thin. This means that every time the demand wave covers us, there simply is not enough coins to quickly raise the price. Do not be surprised, that is how it works.

Another fundamental factor why there is a rise in the price of Bitcoin was the movement towards the mass distribution of cryptocurrency among institutional investors. It is important that such investors began not only to invest “free cash” in the cryptocurrency but to express disappointment towards gold which was supported by the Bitcoin advertising campaign launched by entrepreneur Barry Zilbert. BTC fundamentally beaten its main competitors in the number of active addresses as well — this figure rose to 150,000 in April while the main competitors fell.

Also, the rise in Bitcoin prices may be associated with renewed interest to the cryptocurrency market due to the fact that more and more brokerage companies consider the opportunity to launch cryptocurrency for trading. For instance, American exchange NASDAQ and broker Etrade.

Moreover, a number of experts assume that geopolitical and macroeconomic instability, in particular the trade war between the US and China, has led to an increase in demand for alternative assets including Bitcoin.

The other round of the US-China trade negotiations ended last week ineffectually against the background of the next increase in the US duties on Chinese goods. Thus, the United States increased duties from 10% to 25% on Chinese imports amounting to about $200 billion. Also the US President Donald Trump ordered to increase duties on all remaining imports from China, estimated at about $300 billion. In response, the Chinese Ministry of Finance announced that from June 1 Beijing will impose increased duties on the goods imports from the US in the amount of $60 billion.

Perhaps, the factor of the US-China trade wars has been added. They will lead to a weakening of the US dollar and the Yuan. Bitcoin as an alternative may be interesting for some categories of investors in this case.

Considering all the previously mentioned facts and factors affecting the crypto market situation, founder of Velvet Exchange Vlad Smirnov claims that Bitcoin will cross the border of $10,000 in the coming days.