UPDATED 23:34 EDT / JUNE 26 2019

BLOCKCHAIN

Cryptocurrency exchanges crash as bitcoin breaks through $13,000

The price of bitcoin continued to surge Wednesday, breaking through $13,000 and hitting levels last seen in January 2018.

For better or worse, many observers are calling the rise a rerun of 2017. Bitcoin’s precipitous price rise started in March when bitcoin surged through $4,000 after trading in the mid-$3,000 range since December. As recently as a week ago, bitcoin was teasing $10,000 before passing $11,000 over the weekend.

The upward price surge has not been without drama. After hitting a high of $13,845.89 a little before 4 p.m. EDT, bitcoin’s price dropped to nearly $12,000 an hour later. That caused leading U.S. bitcoin exchange Coinbase to crash and become inaccessible to users for roughly 30 minutes. Robinhood Financial LLC also suffered issues at around the same time, according to CoinDesk.

Neither company specified why it had suffered outages, but both were likely related to trading volume. Bitcoin’s price increases and price volatility have a direct correlation to trading volume, and the amount of bitcoin traded today may not have set a record but was its highest in the last 30 days.

Bitcoin trading volume on major exchanges over the last 24 hours came in at 337,000 bitcoin, worth approximately $4.2 billion, nearly double the volume traded on any other day over the last month, according to data from Bitcoinity. About $250 million in bitcoin is said to have traded hands in a 5-minute period as the price drop began, blowing out to $690 million over a 15-minute period.

The roller coaster that is bitcoin’s price is not new nor is its current surge. Even before it neared $20,000 at the end of 2017 before crashing, bitcoin’s history was already full of price surges followed by corrections.

The biggest question this time around: How high will bitcoin go?

Baring any unexpected surprises, bitcoin appears likely to break through $20,000 this time around. Although that’s a speculative prediction, every bitcoin boom-and-bust cycle has seen bitcoin peak higher than it had the time before. Cointelegraph argued that along with a fear of missing out, bitcoin’s network fundamentals are much stronger this time around, with daily on-chain transaction volume, block size and other metrics confirming that more people than ever are using bitcoin.

Going even further out on a limb, Simon Peters, an analyst at social trading platform eToro, told CCN that he believes that bitcoin could go as high as $50,000 or even $100,000.

Despite having roots going back to March, the recent increases in bitcoin’s price keeps being attributed to one particular event: what the Financial Times dubs “Facebank,” Facebook’s announcement of its entry into the cryptocurrency space with Libra June 18. Although there’s certainly some credence to the argument that Facebook’s announcement has brought wider attention to cryptocurrencies as a whole, it still doesn’t explain bitcoin nearly doubling in price over the last two weeks.

After an exciting day for investors, bitcoin was trading at $12,711 as of 8:30 p.m. PDT, up 5% over the last 24 hours.

Photo: Maxpixel

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