When Bitcoin (BTC) price soared above $ 55,300 in the morning trading session, its market cap topped $ 1 trillion for the first time on February 19. The breakout continued throughout the day and within the last hour BTC price hit another all-time high at $ 56,368.
After Bitcoin cemented its status as a trillion dollar asset among Amazon, Apple, and Google, older banks are showing increasing interest in providing cryptocurrency custody services to their customers.
BTC / USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
According to Treyce Dahlem, an analyst at TheTIE, social media conversations involving the “bitcoin” keyword have increased 38% since Feb. 18. More than 102,000 tweets were sent in the last 24 hours, and this is only “30,000 tweets shy away from a new record high.”
Dahlem said:
“The number of Twitter users who talk about Bitcoin every day has reached a new all-time high of 38,500, an increase of 325% over the previous year.
Altcoins go up when DeFi and CeFi start to merge
Daily market performance in cryptocurrencies. Source: Coin360
Several altcoins have hit new all-time highs along with BTC and Ether (ETH) as both centralized and decentralized exchange tokens have seen strong breakouts.
Binance Coin (BNB) continued to benefit from the growing influence of the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as the rising volume lifted the token to a new high of $ 348.72.
This parabolic rally secured BNB the third place project by market capitalization behind Bitcoin and Ether.
DeFi-related projects such as PancakeSwap (CAKE) and Venus (VXS) are two of the main attractions at BSC, hitting new highs at $ 20.62 and $ 101.50, respectively. REN also made waves after its recent integration with BSC helped push the token to a record high of $ 1.69.
Traditional markets close the week mixed
After a week of new highs for major indices, traditional markets closed Friday’s mixed week as the US economy continued to be hit by the pandemic and rising unemployment.
The NASDAQ ended the day up 0.07% while the Dow was flat. The S&P 500 yielded 0.19%.
The bullish momentum could extend over the weekend
As traditional markets close for the week, the upward momentum driving Bitcoin and Altcoins up shows no signs of slowing. Recent historical data shows that Bitcoin’s rallies will tend to happen during the week in 2021, and many analysts believe the senior digital asset could attack the $ 60,000 level over the weekend.
The nature of the 24/7 crypto sector means that markets are always active somewhere on the planet. As the current bull market is attracting more attention from private and institutional investors, the downward trend in trading volume on weekends no longer appears to have an effect.
While the price of Ether (ETH) stayed below $ 2,000, it still managed to hit a new all-time high of $ 1,974.
There is growing bullish murmur that institutional investors are keenly interested in the returns that will be generated by investing in Eth2 and participating in the growing DeFi sector. Both are the driving force behind the growing demand for ether.
Total capitalization of the cryptocurrency. Source: CoinMarketCap
The recent price bursts of top tokens like Bitcoin and Binance Coin, as well as DeFi superstars like REN and CAKE have also helped push the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency sector to a new record high of $ 1.705 trillion. Bitcoin’s dominance is currently 61.1%.
