Bitcoin's (BTC) price has risen 3.4 percent to break through US$62,818.62, a day before US cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase plans to float on the stock market.
Bitcoin, which has been up and down over the last few weeks, had reportedly jumped to more than US$61,000 over the weekend.
Coinbase is reportedly on course to make history as the first major crypto company to go public, paving the way to legitimize an industry marred with distrust from regulators and traditional investors.
According to Statista, Bitcoin was worth over US$60,000 after the Bitcoin price surged due to Tesla investing 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in the cryptocurrency.
Bitcoins are traded on several independent exchanges worldwide and there may be differences in the prices. The bitcoin price index provides the average price across the leading global exchanges.
The virtual currency has had a volatile trading history since its creation in 2009. The first price hike reportedly occurred during 2013 when one bitcoin was trading at around 1,124 U.S. dollars in November. Four years later, bitcoin experienced a meteoric rise and reached record highs, with some exchanges having the price of a single bitcoin at approximately 20,000 U.S. dollars in late 2017. However, prices soon started to tumble in the months that followed. In the third quarter of 2020, there were around 18.5 million bitcoins in circulation worldwide, and the market capitalization of Bitcoin was approximately 200 billion U.S. dollars.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to control its creation and management, rather than relying on central authorities. The history of Bitcoin started with the invention and implemented by the presumed pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cypherpunk community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant currency both on- and offline. From the mid 2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
