After briefly dropping below $50K yesterday, thanks to a hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation report, Bitcoin has bounced back up. The overall market value of Bitcoin’s circulating supply breached $1 trillion today after the BTC price ticked above the $51,000 milestone.
Bitcoin Reclaims Its $1-Trillion Asset Status
Bitcoin has touched the $1 trillion market cap for the first time since December 2021.
At press time, BTC costs $51,681, according to data from CoinGecko. It’s gained 6.2% over the last 24 hours and an eye-watering 20.3% since this time last week.
BTC seemed like it was having a sluggish year after the greenlighting of 10 hotly-anticipated spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in mid-January.
The spot market products secured the regulatory nod from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after a decade of rejections, but the price of Bitcoin slumped. This was because one of the largest fund managers, Grayscale Investments, sold massive amounts of Bitcoin after users wanted to redeem their shares. That selling pressure looks to have subdued in recent days, though, and money is pouring back into the market.
The new spot investment vehicles have now seen over $3 billion worth of net flows — representing a milestone that is not typical within the first four weeks of trading for a newly-listed ETF.
Bitcoin’s notable growth comes as the Crypto Fear and Greed Index had soared to its highest point since late 2021 when Bitcoin attained its current lifetime high of $69,044.77. As per data from Alternative.me, the greed index inched into the “extreme greed” rating of 79 on Feb. 13. Hitting an extreme greed score for the first time in over two years indicates a renewal of optimism among crypto investors. Bitcoin’s market sentiment score now sits at 74.
The top crypto’s concerted attempt to hold its price above the $50,000 zone this year happens as the next Bitcoin halving, a quadrennial event when the reward to miners for securing the Bitcoin blockchain is halved, is due in April.