Just last week, a number of analysts were calling for a pullback in the Bitcoin price, citing the fact that per their analysis, BTC was well “overbought” and poised for a correction.
But, in a surprising turn of events, bulls have managed to keep control of the cryptocurrency market. Since last week’s low of $7,450, BTC has shot back up to $9,300, where it sits now. This move higher has been accompanied by a surge in growth of the Bitcoin blockchain, boding well for the industry as a whole.
Bitcoin Sees Milestone Amid Rally to $9,000
According to a recent tweet from crypto researcher Kevin Rooke, the number of daily active addresses on the Bitcoin network recently surpassed one million for the first time since early-2018, after trending higher since the start of the year. In fact, on January 1st, there were around 600,000 active addresses. Per Rooke, this decimates the narrative that Bitcoin isn’t seeing use as an asset.
It isn’t clear what has resulted in this increase, but it likely has much to do with speculative activity (exchange-to-exchange transfers), the adoption of BTC (AT&T, Whole Foods, etc.), and the rise of coin mixing services, which necessitate the need for many addresses to sufficiently obfuscate identities in transactions.
"nOboDY uSeS BiTcOin"
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— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) June 15, 2019
This isn’t the only positive sign. The first time Bitcoin broke the aforementioned milestone in November 2017, the median transaction fee was a hefty $3.23.
On the latest day that this milestone, the median transaction fee was a relatively measly $1.33 — brought down as a result of better fee algorithms in wallets, growth in the adoption of SegWit, and the use of other methods by service providers and individuals to bring down fees across the board.
It is important to note that not all of Bitcoin’s fundamentals are too hot. In a separate tweet published a day after the aforementioned, Rooke revealed that compared to the first time that BTC surmounted $9,000, which occurred during the mania phase of the 2017 bubble, Bitcoin isn’t looking all too hot.
The number of payments is down by 20%, adjusted transaction volumes are down 69%, the median transaction value is down 76%, the number of transactions per block is down by 3%.
What this seemingly signifies is that BTC is being used less as a medium for value transfer between exchanges, but more as a daily driver asset, which isn’t a horrible thing to see per se.
Bitcoin first hit $9,000 USD on Nov 27, 2017.
Now that Bitcoin is back at $9,000, what has changed? pic.twitter.com/TY5RMQecES
— Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) June 17, 2019
Accompanied by Strong Fundamentals
This growth in the Bitcoin blockchain has coincided with a boost in the fundamentals of the broader cryptocurrency industry.
On the investment side of cryptocurrency, Bakkt has recently revealed that it is on the verge of launching its physically-backed Bitcoin futures contract. This comes after Bakkt enlisted months of discussions with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to iron out any kinks in its cryptocurrency product, which analysts say is slated to entice institutions to throw dozens of millions at Bitcoin.
In a similar string of news, Nasdaq has teamed up with CryptoCompare, a leading industry data provider, to launch the so-called “Nasdaq/CryptoCompare Aggregate Crypto Reference Prices.” The venture will be launched through Quandi, a Nasdaq-owned, well-regarded finance data outlet that services hundreds of thousands of professionals on Wall Street to its Asian counterpart.
On the adoption side of the industry, Facebook is expected to launch a white paper (and potential testnet) for its cryptocurrency, dubbed “Libra” or “Globalcoin”, this week. More importantly, the venture has secured investments from massive corporations.
These include but aren’t limited to Visa, PayPal, Mastercard, Coinbase, Uber, Lyft, Spotify, a16z, eBay, Union Square Ventures, and Stripe. Pundits, like former Wall Streeter Caitlin Long, believe that the project will drive adoption of cryptocurrencies overall.
