The bitcoin bull market continues rallying as bitcoin receives more Wall Street attention and Janet Yellen is announced as incoming Treasury Secretary
Bitcoin has done it: on Monday morning, the leading cryptocurrency set a new all-time high on top exchanges. On OKCoin, the cryptocurrency moved as high as $19,920, representing a strong increase from the weekly lows.
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TL;DR
- Bitcoin set a new all-time high price at $19,950 on leading exchanges.
- The rally came after a strong drop late last week that was seemingly a result of liquidity and buying pressure decreasing on a holiday weekend.
- Bitcoin gained another Wall Street supporter this past week with Guggenheim Investments.
- Data shows that U.S. PayPal users are extremely excited about buying cryptocurrency and using it as a means of payment.
Here’s your market snapshot:
All prices are in USD and time zones are PT. Prices are as of 2:30pm PT.
BTC dropped 17% last week — why?
After moving as high as $19,500 last Tuesday as we reported in our previous Bitcoin Moves, the market faced a strong correction heading into thanksgiving weekend. In the span of 48 hours, bitcoin fell from $19,500 to lows around $16,200, for a drop of 17%.
The running theory is that due to it being a holiday, the institutional buyers that bid bitcoin from the $10,000 region to $19,000 had temporarily stopped trading, resulting in a market of sellers. There were also two bearish rumors that sparked fears amongst buyers. Some analysts say that these rumors contributed to the sell-off.
By the end of the week, bitcoin was sitting around $17,000, seemingly poised to move lower. But through the weekend, the cryptocurrency market inched higher, until, on Monday morning, the market exploded to new all-time highs.
According to Brock Connelly, the founder of RoundBlock Capital, this latest leg higher was marked by a “relentless buy program” appearing in the CME’s bitcoin futures market. This suggests a strong institutional interest in the cryptocurrency.
Underlying this rapid price action were clear signs that retail and institutional players are entering the market en-masse.
Bitcoin trends on Twitter, covered by all top outlets amid a push to new all-time high
Bitcoin’s surge higher resulted in a surge in public interest in BTC and the digital asset markets as a whole.
On Monday, there were multiple reports of the hashtags for bitcoin and ethereum trending on Twitter. Most of the tweets using the hashtag involved the rally, with many expressing their excitement about the market after a brutal drawdown early this year.
The rally also resulted in an influx of media coverage of the bitcoin market, with CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and many other media outlets covering the new all-time high.
CNBC’s “Squawk Box” show brought on the Winklevoss Twins, bitcoin billionaires, to talk shop.
They said that they think the leading cryptocurrency still has a lot of room to rally in this market cycle. Tyler Winklevoss specifically mentioned that the coin could move to $500,000 this market cycle, referencing how he thinks it will overtake gold as the leading store of value.
Our CEO, Hong Fang, recently explained in a Coindesk op-ed why she sees the price of bitcoin reaching over $500,000 within the next 10 years, and hitting $100k within the next 12 months.
Guggenheim throws weight behind bitcoin
This past week, bitcoin gained yet another large institutional supporter: Guggenheim Partners, a prominent Wall Street asset manager with hundreds of billions under management.
Guggenheim Funds Trust filed an amendment to the investment mandate for its Macro Opportunities Fund to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week. The fund has $5 billion under management. The update revealed that the fund can invest up to 10 percent of its assets ($500 million) into Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).
Grayscale is a regulated digital asset manager that caters to institutional players by allowing them to obtain exposure to bitcoin. One concern with Grayscale’s products is that they trade at an extreme premium on secondary markets, making traditional exchanges better for retail investors.
Guggenheim’s global CIO, Scott Minerd, released a macro report earlier this year painting a bitcoin bull case without mentioning the word “bitcoin.” The report, entitled “The Faustian Bargain,” highlighted that due to the pandemic, it became highly likely that the debasement of fiat money would be inevitable:
“By quickly turning up the printing presses, global central banks would need to
provide reserves at a faster rate than the collapse in the velocity of money. This is a delicate exercise and one that would be difficult to execute successfully. The risks on both sides are not moving quickly enough and overdoing it. If there is too little money made available, the prices of assets used as collateral backing loans will spiral downward. If there is too much, inflation will spiral out of control.”
Minerd has seemingly never commented on bitcoin in public, though he did host a fireside chat with someone supporting bitcoin in 2014.
Through Guggenheim, he is the latest Wall Street bull to have thrown his support behind Bitcoin.
Previous individuals include Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the world’s best asset managers, and billionaire macro investor Paul Tudor Jones. Also, last week, Anthony Scaramucci’s fund Skybridge Capital updated its investment mandate to include exposure to bitcoin, digital assets, and equity in crypto companies.
These latest events show just how much Wall Street support bitcoin is garnering.
PayPal is seeing rapid crypto adoption already: report
According to a report published by Mizuho Securities obtained first by CoinDesk, approximately 20 percent of American PayPal users have already used the application to trade cryptocurrencies.
65% of the respondents to the Mizuho Securities survey said that they would use bitcoin as a currency to pay PayPal’s 28 million merchants.
Although PayPal has yet to service all of its clientele, this interest shows that there is an increasing retail interest in cryptocurrency, along with a large contingent of users that would actually use bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
Janet Yellen to become U.S. Treasury Secretary
Although not explicitly bitcoin-related, many in the space reacted to the news that Janet Yellen is set to become the U.S. Treasury Secretary for the Biden administration.
Janet Yellen is a former Federal Reserve chair, having held the office from 2014 to 2018. She is an accomplished economist and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Many see the Treasury Secretary as the most important regulator when it comes to bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Jake Chervinsky, a lawyer working in the space, commented in November:
“This is the single most important decision for the next four years of US crypto policy. The next Treasury Secretary will have an enormous influence on whether the right to financial privacy is upheld or sacrificed to mass surveillance & forced custodianship. Fingers crossed.”
Yellen is purported to be a bullish pick for bitcoin. She, notably, is far from a fan of the cryptocurrency, though many believe she is a fan of printing money or issuing stimulus to solve economic issues. Investor Anthony Pompliano wrote in his newsletter after Yellen was rumored to be the pick last week:
“Janet Yellen will solidify the narrative that higher inflation is coming. She will drive home the point that monetary stimulus bombs are always right around the corner. This will be an even stronger tailwind for bitcoin in the coming 12 months. With bitcoin poised to hit an all-time high in the coming days, you can’t help but smile.”
Her nomination was confirmed today.
China Bitcoin mining rumor
Rumors broke on Twitter on the weekend that Chinese authorities had begun to restrict energy distribution, disallowing certain Chinese miners from actually mining the bitcoin network.
Cryptocurrency journalist “Wu” wrote on the matter:
“Several miners told Wu that Baoshan, Yunnan, where China’s crypto mines are located, received a ban on November 30, requiring the power station to stop supplying power to the miners. Yunnan is the third largest mining place in China after Sichuan and Xinjiang.”
The user attached an image to their tweet showing an order from local governments to stop mining cryptocurrency.
It is unclear how widespread this ban/restriction is as Bitcoin’s hash rate is holding up quite well.
Though, there was a period on Monday morning where there were no BTC blocks for nearly two hours. It is currently unclear if this was just a result of chance or a result of a potential ban on Bitcoin mining in some regions in China.
On-chain trends
According to IntoTheBlock, bitcoin is currently “mostly bearish” as per their seven core metrics, which are based on on-chain trends and market data such as order books.
Three out of their seven core metrics currently are “bearish.” These are the net network growth, large transactions, and futures market momentum metrics. The large transactions metric could be seen as bullish, as it may imply that there is increased holding activity.
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