Bitcoin soared on Tuesday to an all-time high that hit the $ 50,000 mark, at $ 50,602.
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Bitcoin slipped on Monday, stopping its impressive concentration after Elon Musk said prices “seem high.”
The world’s most valuable cryptocurrency plunged more than 10% to a price of $ 51,993 Monday morning, according to Coin Metrics data. At one point, Bitcoin had fallen below the $ 50,000 level, to $ 47,700.
It was not immediately known what was behind the Bitcoin drop on Monday. On Saturday, Tesla’s CEO said prices for rival bitcoin and symbolic ether seemed excessive. Bitcoin rallied to more than $ 58,000 on Sunday, but has since reversed course.
As of 10:25 am ET, Bitcoin was trading around 8% lower at a price of $ 53,375. It is worth noting that price changes of more than 10% are not a rarity in cryptography. Bitcoin once rose to nearly $ 20,000 in 2017 before launching 80% of its value the following year.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned Monday that Bitcoin was a “highly speculative asset” and said she was concerned that investors would lose their money.
“It’s an extremely inefficient way to conduct transactions and the amount of energy consumed in processing those transactions is impressive,” the former Federal Reserve chairman said.
The digital currency has still risen more than 80% so far this year. Last week, Bitcoin first reached $ 1 trillion in market value; it is now back below that mark, according to CoinDesk. The testimony has received a boost from news from major Wall Street Banks and Fortune 500 companies heating up in cryptocurrencies.
Musk recently came out as a believer in bitcoin, calling it “good” and saying he believes it is “on the verge of gaining widespread acceptance by people of conventional finance.”
Earlier this month, Tesla said it had bought bitcoin worth $ 1.5 billion and would accept cryptography as payment for its products. The electric vehicle maker made about $ 1 billion in paper profits with its investment in bitcoins, according to Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities.
Tesla “is on track to earn more from its investments in Bitcoin than the profits from the sale of EV (electric vehicles) vehicles throughout 2020,” Ives estimated in a note released Saturday.
Bitcoin is gaining strength from major investors, in part because of the perception that it is a store of similar value to gold. Bitcoin bulls have tried to claim that investors should add cryptocurrency to their portfolio to protect themselves from a potential rise in inflation.
But skeptics are not convinced. JPMorgan analysts said in a note last week that bitcoin is an “economic spectacle” and that the rise of digital finance, not bitcoin, is the “real story of the financial transformation of the Covid-era. 19 “.