BlackRock’s Entry Pushes Bitcoin Above $52,500, Ethereum (ETH) Skyrockets to $1900 With New ATH

18. Feb 2021 Posted by Akolkar B on News

The cryptocurrency market is buzzing with new highs as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) skyrocket to new all-time highs. Earlier today, the Bitcoin (BTC) surged all the way above $52,500 gaining another 5% soon after it crossed the $50K milestone.

The recent Bitcoin price rally has been fueled with the entry of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock in the Bitcoin space. On Wednesday, February 17, BlackRock CEO chief investment officer of global fixed income Rick Rieder told CNBC that his company has started to ‘dabble’ a bit into Bitcoin.

Although BlackRock didn’t disclose its exact investment amount, Rieder said: “Today the volatility of it is extraordinary, but listen, people are looking for storehouses of value. People are looking for places that could appreciate under the assumption that inflation moves higher and that debts are building, so we’ve started to dabble a bit into it.”

Last month BlackRock also added Bitcoin futures as a potential investment for two of its funds. The recent entry from BlockRock comes just at time when the BTC price has already surged 70% year-to-date.

Explaining the reason behind entering at this stage Rieder said: “We’re holding a lot more cash than we’ve held historically. It’s because duration doesn’t work, interest rates don’t work as a hedge and so diversifying into other assets makes some sense. Holding some portion of what you hold in cash in things like crypto seems to make some sense to me, but I wouldn’t espouse a certain allocation or target holding.”

On the other hand, Ethereum has also hit its new all-time high crossing $1900 levels for the very first time. At press time, Ethereum (ETH) is trading at a price of $1913 with a market cap of $219 billion.

With its recent price rally, Ethereum has registered a 150% gains so far in 2021. The Ethereum price rally has been fueled with strong institutional participation.

On Wednesday, February 17, the Graysclae Ethereum Trust (ETHE) purchased an additional 20,000 ETH coins taking its net assets under managements to above $5.6 billion. In February so far, Grayscale has purchased over 200,000 ETH coins nearly $400 million.