This is Why Bitcoin is Nearing an All-time High in 2020

This past Friday Bitcoin topped $18,600 and was inching very close to the cryptocurrency’s all-time high of $19,800 that was seen at the end of December in 2017.

This year the largest digital currency by market cap has seen gains of 160%. It has moved up 190% since March 15th before a crash sent it falling down 25%.

So why is Bitcoin on such an explosive run this year? According to reports, traditional finance embracing crypto have fueled more buying. “Bitcoin thrives off network value, so the more people who adopt it, the more parabolically the price rises,” Tom Lee of Fundstrat said on Yahoo Finance Live last Friday. “We’ve seen a pretty substantial increase in engagement this year, and I’ve been pretty surprised, because it is institutional.”

It was in August that Goldman Sachs named a new head of digital assets, Matthew McDermott, who reportedly plans to double the headcount of Goldman’s crypto team.

It was in 2019 that JMPmorgan launched JPM Coin, an internal digital token for use by the bank’s institutional clients, which runs on the Quorum blockchain that JPM developed and is overseen by JPM’s blockchain unit Onyx.

Onyx CEO Umar Farooq wrote in a blog post at the time, “We have always believed in the potential of blockchain technology, and we are supportive of cryptocurrencies as long as they are properly controlled and regulated.”

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said in a CNBC interview on Monday that bitcoin’s usefulness as a currency will ultimately prevail over the buy-and-hold ethos.

Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” he said, “I think that there’ll be more and more use cases for cryptocurrencies,” that make bitcoin more widely accepted, more stable and probably “more valuable” over time.

PayPal will begin allowing users to transact with crypto as a funding instrument across 28 million businesses in early 2021.

According to Schulman, central bank digital currency is a global inevitability. As that
happens, “you’ll have more and more utility happen with cryptocurrencies,” he said. “Both may play important roles going forward.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.