On Saturday, 13th March 2021, Bitcoin briefly surpassed $60,000 for the first time, as growing funding from corporate titans aids the world’s most common virtual currency in continuing its record-breaking streak.
As per the site CoinMarketCap, the cryptographic money arrived at an unequalled high of $60,012 at 1149 GMT. Bitcoin has been on a meteoric rise since March last year, when it peaked at $5,000, fuelled by PayPal’s announcement that account holders will be able to use cryptocurrency.
Elon Musk’s electric carmaker Tesla invested $1.5 billion in the virtual currency last month, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and rap mogul Jay-Z said they are starting a fund to make Bitcoin “the internet’s currency.”
Wall Street giant BNY Mellon, hedge fund behemoth BlackRock, and credit card behemoth Mastercard are among those who have entered the bandwagon. Bitcoin, which was first presented in 2009, stood out as truly newsworthy in 2017 in the wake of soaring from under $1,000 in January to almost $20,000 in December.
The virtual bubble then exploded in the days following, with bitcoin’s value fluctuating wildly before plummeting below $5,000 by October 2018. Financial backers and Wall Street account titans were charmed by bewildering development, the potential for benefit and resource expansion, and a protected store of significant worth to prepare for swelling in the earlier year’s ascent.
Bitcoins are exchanged using Blockchain, which is a decentralized registry framework. To control and execute transactions, the system needs a lot of computer processing power. “Miners” provide the power in the hopes of receiving new bitcoins in exchange for validating transaction data.