Bitcoin (BTC) Price Crosses $17,500 For The First Time Since January 2018

There’s no stopping Bitcoin (BTC) investors as the world’s largest cryptocurrency surges past $17,500 levels for the first time since January 2018 and hitting its new 2020-high.

At press time, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $17,608 as per WorldCoinIndex with the market cap over $325 billion. With this move, Bitcoin extends its overall cryptocurrency market dominance close to 66%. Over the last week itself, Bitcoin price has surged nearly 15% as the bulls raged-in.

If we see the year-to-date performance, Bitcoin (BTC) price is nearly 135% up as on date. On the other hand, the BTC price has multiplied by 4x since its low in March 2020. With the Coronavirus-driven economic crisis, an increasing number of investors have started looking at Bitcoin hedge against the rising inflation.

Over the last few months, some of the big institutional players from the financial space, hedge fund managers, veteran investors, have all warmed up to Bitcoin. Bitcoin proponents say that its inherent model of a fixed supply and independent of government institutions bring it a much higher value proposition.

Many investors have also started Bitcoin as a potential alternative to Gold. Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, an Analyst at JPMorgan said: "The virus crisis is propagating the reassessment of bitcoin. There is a reassessment about its value here as an alternative currency, as an alternative to gold.”

Even some of the big banking giants like Citibank and JPMorgan has started giving new price targets for Bitcoin. Many of the investors believe that this is just the beginning of the Bitcoin bull run and the world’s largest cryptocurrency can be on a wild ride in 2021.

Digital asset manager Grayscale that offers crypto services to institutional players said that its Bitcoin Trust product GBTC now holds more than half-a-million worth of Bitcoins amounting to $8.3 billion.

Bitcoin has received a solid backing even from some of the veteran investors in Wall Street. It looks as if Bitcoin has no looking back at this point as the cryptocurrency is just 12% short from its all-time high.