Bitcoin Price Breaks $60,000 Mark as Crypto Optimism Swells

Optimism among cryptocurrency investors has reportedly pushed bitcoin’s price above $60,000.

As Bloomberg News reported Wednesday (Feb. 28), the world’s most popular crypto hadn’t seen its price hit that mark in more than two years, with many believing that demand for bitcoin is growing beyond digital asset true believers.

This year has already seen the price of bitcoin leap around 45%, thanks partially to the launch of bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S. The last time bitcoin traded at $60,000 was November 2021, after reaching a record high of $69,000 that same month. On Wednesday, its price hovered at nearly $64,000 briefly.

“It’s pretty nuts,” Ryan Kim, head of derivatives at digital-asset prime brokerage FalconX, told Bloomberg.

The report said a pending reduction in bitcoin’s supply growth, known as the halving, is also helping fuel optimism, spilling over into smaller tokens like ether and dogecoin.

“We are starting to see a pretty clear FOMO kind of rally,” said Zaheer Ebtikar, founder of crypto fund Split Capital. “More and more people are just convinced to buy.”

As noted here earlier this week, the crypto market is rapidly maturing, with high-profile players like Reddit investing in bitcoin, ether and other digital assets, and also using those assets to pay for certain virtual goods.

Two weeks ago, bitcoin reached $50,000 for the first time since December 2021, marking a recovery for a digital asset whose value plunged 64% in 2022.

In addition, venture capital (VC) firms are returning to the cryptocurrency and Web3 space, PYMNTS reported last week. These investors seem to be focused more on infrastructure plays than in they had been before, with funding being shifted much less to service providers in favor of establishing foundational ecosystems.

And as that report said, more money is shifting to the artificial intelligence space, as observers think that AI’s usefulness is much more easily understood than crypto’s bold claim that it was creating its own financial system.

“Smaller investors are also returning to crypto, though with less enthusiasm than they had in the past,” PYMNTS wrote recently. “These everyday crypto enthusiasts, who lost billions when the markets plummeted in 2022, could be returning to the space in the wake of last month’s launch of U.S. ETFs investing directly in bitcoin.”