The crypto world experienced shades of 2017 overnight as Bitcoin soared to highs of $9,490, with exchanges such as Coinbase experiencing outages as a result of higher trading volume. Bitcoin has now put in an extraordinary week’s work, registering a 23% rise in advance of the halving, with two weeks still to go until the actual event.
Bitcoin’s Busy Week
As FullyCrypto’s in-house analyst Will Gambit predicted yesterday, a push past $8,000 was indeed the catalyst to take Bitcoin into the low $9,000s and beyond. The increase in price has come with some of the most concentrated period of buying since October 2019 when Bitcoin enjoyed a $2,750 rise in a single day on the back of China’s President endorsing blockchain technology.
Bitcoin’s move dragged the entire market with it, with three coins managing to outperform it during the pump – DATA, SC, and OMG. ETH, BSV, BCH, and ADA also tried their best to keep up with Bitcoin, with other large caps potentially waiting until Bitcoin cools down before liquidity moves into them.
The Old Guard Fails to Cope
Bitcoin’s performance brought back echoes of the bull run in 2017, where it would frequently jump over $500 out of the blue, putting both new and inexperienced exchanges alike under enormous pressure. Exchanges coped by well with the massive volume increase by and large yesterday, although Coinbase and Coinbase Pro suffered outages as volume spiked:
We are currently experiencing intermittent downtime on https://t.co/QuP4CcEF7W. We’ve identified the issue and are working on a fix. We’ll let you know when we’re back up! https://t.co/1mkpl8Czwu
— Coinbase Support (@CoinbaseSupport) April 29, 2020
Kraken is also reported to have struggled, reporting “very heavy traffic” during the latter part of Wednesday and seeing their API go down. While some lamented the frailty of exchanges in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, others were feeling in a more nostalgic mood:
Coinbase app is crashing. 2017 vibes pic.twitter.com/SJ4jGFJ5Ua
— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) April 29, 2020
Where Does Bitcoin Stop?
The question of where Bitcoin stops is of course a very difficult one to answer, although it is now in very much a parabolic state, which means a sharp correction is due. Where this happens though and how deep it goes remains to be seen, but there is no discounting the potential to go to $10,000 before the halving, which would almost certainly spell the top.
