Bitcoin shot past $59,000 early Wednesday morning and Ethereum reached the $3,300 mark amid growing bullish sentiment among crypto traders.
Together, BTC and ETH now account for $1.5 trillion, or 67%, of all digital assets globally. In the past day, the global market capitalization has grown by 3% to $2.3 trillion.
The Bitcoin price, currently $59,266.94 has risen 5.4% since this time yesterday and 15% since a week ago, according to CoinGecko data.
BTC, the world’s largest and oldest cryptocurrency, has been the beneficiary of a strong tailwind from the nine new spot Bitcoin ETFs that began trading in January. As of early Wednesday morning, the ETFs along with other BTC exchange-traded products have seen a total of $3.8 billion worth of volume and have a market capitalization just shy of $45 billion, according to CoinGlass.
On Tuesday alone, the spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net inflows worth $359 million.
The growing hope among traders is that because the ETFs have been taking in more Bitcoin than is newly released on the network each day, it will supercharge the effect of the Bitcoin halving in April.
The Bitcoin halving reduces the rewards paid to Bitcoin miners for validating transactions. In the history of Bitcoin, it’s already happened three times before in 2012, 2016, and 2020. The block reward used to be 50 BTC, but has now been reduced to 6.25 BTC. After this year’s halving—currently schedule for the middle of April—the block reward will be reduced to 3.125 BTC.
It’s an anti-inflationary mechanism to reduce the rate at which Bitcoin’s 21 billion supply is released to the network. The periodical reminder of scarcity tends to kick off a bull run each time it’s happened before, but it remains to be seen how things will play out this time.
Meanwhile, Ethereum has been getting a boost from anticipation for its Dencun upgrade. The change became even more real yesterday when developers announced that the change will be pushed to Ethereum mainnet on March 13, 2024.
The upgrade will usher in proto-danksharding, which will make transactions on the network much faster and more affordable.
There have also been signs that institutions are starting to give Ethereum a bigger footprint in their portfolios, according to a new report from ByBit.
