Text size
Concern over regulatory scrutiny slammer the price of Bitcoin earlier in the year.
Dreamstime
Bitcoin bulls got a reprieve late Sunday as the cryptocurrency briefly rose above $50,000 for the first time in three months. The price remains far below its April peak of nearly $65,000, but investors are finding reasons to pile back in.
While Bitcoin began rising from its recent trough of below $30,000 in July, two recent events helped to push it above the $50,000 mark. Last week,
Coinbase
(ticker: COIN), the cryptocurrency exchange platform, said it would buy $500 million of crypto assets and that it plans to allocate 10% of its profits into a crypto portfolio.
Then on Monday,
PayPal
(PYPL) unveiled an offering that would allow U.K.-based customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies, marking the company’s first international expansion of its crypto services.
In Monday morning trading, Bitcoin was just below $50,000 at $49,836.69. Shares with exposure to Bitcoin were up, but off highs reached in premarket trading. Coinbase advanced 0.5%, PayPal gained 0.9%, and
MicroStrategy,
an enterprise software firm that recently issued bonds to buy Bitcoin, saw its shares rise 0.7%.
Bitcoin has had a tough go in recent months. The cryptocurrency rose to fresh highs earlier this year, but the price tumbled following regulatory scrutiny in China and the prospect of more of the same in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Over the past few weeks, Bitcoin has posted “the market’s largest cryptocurrency recovery,” according to Tony Sycamore, an analyst at City Index. Just two months ago, Bitcoin traded below $30,000, marking what technical analysts call a death cross, when the 50-day moving average of an asset falls below its 200-day moving average. He says the rally now faces resistance between $50,000 and $53,500,
Write to Carleton English at carleton.english@dowjones.com