With a New All-Time High, is Bitcoin Price Moving Closer to $9,000?
As CCN.com reported today, the bitcoin price achieved a new all-time high at $8,380. Analysts including Bitfury vice chairman George Kikvadze stated that all indicators point towards strong short and mid-term momentum for bitcoin.
“Buying even more bitcoin at $8000. All indicators are super positive. Most positive they ever been,” said Kikvadze.
Entrance of JPMorgan and Retail Investors
Throughout November, Kikvadze revealed that he has met 30 large-scale institutional investors and retail traders. Out of the 30 investors, 12 are in the process of investing in bitcoin, 10 plan to invest in bitcoin in the short-term, and eight remain undecided.
Earlier this week, Kikvadze explained that multi-billion dollar hedge funds, institutional investors, and retail traders are planning to enter the bitcoin market by the end of 2017, given the increase in the liquidity of bitcoin over the past few months. Today, bitcoin is more liquid than the most liquid stock on earth that is Apple, and process larger daily trading volumes than many of the world’s major stock exchanges.
In fact, Bithumb, the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, processed more trades in one day than the South Korean stock market KOSDAQ, in August of this year.
“One of the investors: ‘Entering Bitcoin investment at $100 billion much much easier than at $10 Billion,’” added Kikvadze.
It has become significantly challenging for institutional investors and investment firms to dismiss bitcoin as an emerging and a rapidly growing currency, store of value, and safe haven asset. Earlier this year, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon vowed to fire any trader within the company who decides to deal with bitcoin and trade the digital currency on behalf of clients, even after it was discovered that several JPMorgan Securities custodian accounts processed bitcoin trades via the Nordic Nasdaq (Sweden) exchange’s XBT Provider, a bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
Even for JPMorgan, it is not possible to dismiss or ignore the bitcoin market, as the demand from institutional and retail investors is simply too large, and is growing exponentially. As such, as Wall Street Journal reported, JPMorgan traders will begin trading bitcoin futures later this year.
“J.P. Morgan is considering whether to provide its clients access to CME’s new bitcoin product through its futures-brokerage unit,” the WSJ report read, citing sources familiar to the matter within the company.
Domino Effect
The market’s optimism regarding the entrance of large-scale investors has already had a major impact on the short-term price trend of bitcoin. As institutional investors officially move into the bitcoin space after the December 11 launch of CME’s bitcoin futures exchange, it will inevitably lead to a domino effect, in which individual investors and organizations rush into acquiring bitcoin as billions of dollars flow into the market.
In the long-term, while there may be minor corrections on the way, the movement of large capital into the bitcoin market will be highly beneficial for the industry, as the liquidity of bitcoin grows and the market matures.
The market’s enthusiasm towards the performance of bitcoin in December would likely push the price of bitcoin to $9,000 in the short-term, even by early December, given that there exists no uncertainty concerning protocol upgrades or hard forks.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
