If you bought 1 bitcoin yesterday, it would have cost you $12,000 and someone in your family would probably call you crazy. But just a day later, you would have been able to sell that same coin for $15,000!
The market cap for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency is currently at $252 billion, and the combined market cap of all cryptocurrencies just passed $400 billion. However, most of the currency’s competitors are in the red, likely because they’re all selling to buy more Bitcoin.
Interestingly, Bitcoin’s popularity in Korea is even higher than in the rest of the world, with the price already above $19,000 on local exchanges.
In addition to the Korean market, the price of Bitcoin is likely to rise following the news that futures for the currency are launching soon on CME, Nasdaq, and CBOE.
Additionally, the Lightning protocol, a technology that will make the currency’s transactions faster, reached version 1.0 on Wednesday. The three companies working on Lightning — ACINQ, Blockstream and Lightning Labs — said they have successfully tested it on real Bitcoin transactions. There’s still a lot of work to be done before Lightning can be implemented securely, but this is promising news for the currency, which has been plagued by slow transactions and high transaction fees.
Bitcoin's price is now up 1,500% since January 2017 and about 3,500% since January 2016.
