The world’s largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, saw its prices rise to more than $9,300 on Sunday, representing a new 2019 high price. Although prices have stalled a little, currently trading around $9,000, some analysts believe momentum could carry the digital currency as high as $10,000 before the next major pullback.
The price surge comes as the market awaits finalized details of Facebook’s upcoming cryptocurrency. Also affecting prices is the news that Binance is restricting access to US users, in order to better comply with the country’s regulations. Binance has announced that it is launching a dedicated US platform.
For most of the past week, Bitcoin has been trading in a channel between $7,500 and $8,000, struggling to pass the upper resistance. On Wednesday, June 12, however, the bulls made a push and trading ended the day above $8,100. It continued to climb, posting gains every day, and started Sunday on a price of $8800. Prices steadily increased, reaching $9,300 at around 07:00 GMT.
Although Bitcoin prices did previously pass $9,000 this year, in May, it not only reached a new high for the year, but posted its highest price since May 2018. The cryptocurrency has more than doubled in value since April.
Binance, which is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange and which trades approximately $2 billion every day, announced on Thursday, June 13, that they were partnering with a company called BAM, who will operate the platform, to launch an official US based exchange. The exchange said that they were launching the platform in order to meet US regulatory exchange requirements.
On Friday, June 14, they further announced that they were limiting US memberships. Initially, this means that anybody trying to join with a US passport, or that lives in the country, will be prevented. In 90 days, on September 12, US members will no longer be able to deposit money or trade. A lot of traders believe this means that US account holders will initially be restricted to a limited choice of crypto currency pairs, which may have led to a sell off of less popular altcoins and the surge in Bitcoin prices.
On Tuesday, Facebook is set to announce official plans for its own cryptocurrency, Libra. In the meantime, they have already secured partnership with Uber, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and other major companies to accept Facebook’s coin. It is likely that the Facebook coin will be tethered to the value of the dollar, which means that it will not be considered a direct competitor to Bitcoin, although it will be operating in the same space.
One altcoin to have seen substantial gains in the past few days was Chainlink (LINK) after Google announced that it would integrate its cloud services with the smart contracts service provider. After the announcement was made, LINK prices rose nearly 70% in less than an hour.
Bitcoin (BTC) has seen its prices rise 2.3% in the past 24 hours and now costs $9,025.57 while Ethereum (ETH) has held steady at $269.36. Ripple (XRP) saw reasonable gains of 3.56% and reached $0.425, as Litecoin (LTC) prices slipped a little to $136.59 and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) rose 1.48% to trade at $426.86. All prices were taken at 23:30 GMT.
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