Bitcoin Breaks Above $20,000 as Investors in the US Return to Riskier Assets

Bitcoin and most altcoins continue to trade in close correlation to growth equities, like tech shares and both Bitcoin price and tech stocks have enjoyed a lift over recent days. Bitcoin thus ended its longest run below the $20,000 (roughly Rs. 16.48 lakh) price level since the crypto token first breached the threshold in late 2020. As things stand, the value of Bitcoin is up by more than 4 percent in the last 24 hours with its price now around the $20,150 (roughly Rs. 16.61 lakh) mark across global exchanges while Indian exchanges like CoinDCX value BTC at $20,957 (roughly Rs. 17.27 lakh), 3.2 percent higher than where its value stood at the beginning of Tuesday.

On global exchanges like CoinMarketCap, Coinbase, and Binance, the price of Bitcoin stands at $20,175 (roughly Rs. 16.63 lakh) while CoinGecko data shows that BTC's value now sits 4.4 percent higher than where it stood last Wednesday.

Ether, the largest smart contracts token, also saw a big surge on late Tuesday alongside BTC. The intra-day fluctuations on the daily chart noted that ETH touched $1,500 (roughly Rs. 1.23 lakh) at one point. However, this rise has now placed Ethereum closer to being overbought. Ether is currently up by roughly 9.46 percent over the past 24 hours across global exchanges. Meanwhile on Indian exchanges, ETH is valued at $1,533 (roughly Rs. 1.26 lakh) where values are up by 9.35 percent over the past day.

Gadgets 360's cryptocurrency price tracker reveals that most major altcoins gained some value alongside Ether with the global crypto market capitalisation numbers also rising by a whopping 5.01 percent through Tuesday and early Wednesday.

Cardano, Avalanche, Cosmos, Solana, Polygon, Uniswap, BNB, TRON, Chainlink, Monero, and Polkadot all saw themselves charting a rise in value.

Memecoins Shiba Inu and Dogecoin saw nominal gains too. Dogecoin is currently valued at $0.06 (roughly Rs. 5.4) after rising 7.77 percent in value over the last 24 hours, while, Shiba Inu is valued at $0.000010 (roughly Rs. 0.000859), up 3.95 percent over the past day.

Analysts at crypto intelligence tracker Glassnode argue that Bitcoin's volatility has hit historical lows and a breakout in BTC is likely. Evaluating both the bullish and bearish scenario for Bitcoin price, analysts noted a conviction among BTC holders in the bear market.

The recent uplift can be attributed to a couple of factors that come to the fore. First, investors are hopeful that the Federal Reserve may not need to raise interest rates as aggressively as the market's been pricing in. The higher interest rate environment unleashed in 2022 to combat soaring inflation has seen the Bitcoin price plunge 58 percent year to date.

A second factor helping support cryptos over the past week is some solid earnings results coming from some of the blue-chip companies reporting in the US. Those expectation beating earnings have helped buoy share markets and cryptos alike.