Bitcoin Surges Past $17,000, Exchanges Face a Huge Overload of Orders
The Bitcoin mania is no more a new thing for the cryptocurrency community but the past 48 hours have shown some crazy spikes in the price of Bitcoin. It took Bitcoin only around a day to rise from $13,000 to up and above $17,000 hitting its new all-time high of $17,839.939 as per our data. This is a whopping 35% rise in just a matter of 24 hours and even the trading volumes are huge at $19.5 billion. The market cap of Bitcoin alone has crossed a quarter billion while the overall cryptocurrency market cap is above $400 billion.
The Bitcoin mania has caused a divide among the financial heavyweights of the world. While there has been a great increase in supporters of the cryptocurrency in the past one year, Bitcoin still remains a subject of continued criticism for some people of the community. Neil Wilson from ETX Capital believes that with the growing popularity, bitcoin is heading towards a “regulatory crunch”.
He further said “It’s a bubble for sure in its dynamic, we just don’t know when or how it will collapse. You’re not going to regulate cryptos out of existence, nor would governments and central banks wish to stop blockchain technology. But they can regulate cryptos to a point where they destroy the value in any one version by taking control of it for themselves. If you say that cryptos are currency, then mining is akin to printing money, which is only a game for central banks and governments.”
In the past few days, there has been a huge inrush of retail investors and financial traders and as per the latest data, Coinbase is adding nearly 100,000 customers daily to its exchange will the total number of users now above 13 million. Moreover, the exchange was hugely overloaded on Dec 7 as the volumes crossed $29 million. It was a huge task for the engineering team to scale up the website. Due to a huge rush of orders, the website suffered some order cancellations and more than 20,000 transactions were piled for more than 24-hours in spite of paying high fees.
Also, the price of Bitcoin was varying wildly across exchanges. The prices varied by $2,000 across exchanges witnessing huge volumes. As Bitcoin futures contracts are just around the corner starting next week, we can further see some more volatility in the price of Bitcoin further in this week. However, nothing can be said at the moment as to which direction will the price swing at this moment. Currently, at the press time, Bitcoin seems to have entered the correction and profit booking zone and as per our data, it is currently trading for a price of $15,491.486, which is a $2,000 dip from its all-time high.