Bitcoin crossed $59,000 on Wednesday morning and Ethereum hit $3,300 amid growing bullishness among crypto traders.
Together, BTC and ETH now account for $1.5 trillion or 67 percent of all digital assets globally. On the previous day, the world market capitalization increased by 3% to 2.3 trillion dollars.
According to CoinGecko data, the price of Bitcoin is currently $59,266.94, up 5.4% since this time and 15% a week ago.
BTC, the world's largest and oldest cryptocurrency, has benefited from a strong tailwind from nine new position Bitcoin ETFs that began trading in January. As of Wednesday morning, ETFs, along with other BTC exchange-traded products, saw a total of $3.8 billion worth of volume and a market capitalization of just $45 billion, according to CoinGlass.
On Tuesday alone, the space Bitcoin ETFs saw net inflows worth $359 million.
Growing hope among traders that ETFs are taking in more bitcoin than is being released on the network each day, will boost the results of the April Bitcoin halving.
The Bitcoin Halving will reduce the reward paid to Bitcoin miners for confirming transactions. It has happened three times before in the history of Bitcoin in 2012, 2016 and 2020. The block reward used to be 50 BTC, but now it has been reduced to 6.25 BTC. After this year's half – currently scheduled for mid-April – the block reward will drop to 3.125 BTC.
Bitcoin's 21 billion supply is an anti-inflation mechanism to reduce the rate at which it is released to the network. A temporary warning of shortages has triggered a bull run every time it's happened before, but it remains to be seen how things will play out this time around.
Meanwhile, Ethereum has been increasing since waiting for the Denko update. The change became even more real when developers announced that the change would be pushed to the Ethereum mainnet on March 13, 2024.
The update brings proto-danksharding, which makes transactions on the network much faster and more affordable.
There are also signs that institutions are starting to make a bigger footprint of Ethereum in their portfolios, according to a new report from Baybit.
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