Bitcoin hit its highest price in more than a year on Thursday as some of the most important firms in traditional finance continue to push into the crypto sector.
The cryptocurrency hit a high of $31,460 early Thursday morning, its highest point in 14 months, before paring gains. It surpassed the 52-week high it reached at the end of June.
Bitcoin was trading at about $30,600, up less than 1%, over the past 24 hours as of publication.
Helping fuel Bitcoin’s strong showing is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s comments on Wednesday in which he touted crypto as digitizing gold.
“Bitcoin is an international asset—it’s not based on any one currency—so it can represent an asset that people can play as an alternative,” he said in an interview on Fox Business.
Fink’s firm, BlackRock, applied to create a spot Bitcoin ETF last month, after which an influx of TradFi players, such as Fidelity, WisdomTree, and Invesco followed suit. After the Securities and Exchange Commission said BlackRock’s application was missing information, Nasdaq, which hopes to list the ETF, refiled the application on Monday. The SEC has never accepted an application for a spot Bitcoin ETF, which invests directly in the cryptocurrency.
Last month, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and Citadel Securities also backed a new exchange, EDX Markets, that wants to offer crypto trading via a middle ground between the worlds of traditional finance and Web3.
The entry of traditional financial firms has helped buoy the price of Bitcoin above $30,000 for the past few weeks and has spurred millions of dollars in inflows to the market.
Last week, investors poured $125 million into some of the most popular digital asset investment products, bringing the total invested over the previous two weeks to $334 million, according to a report by CoinShares. Bitcoin represented 98% of the inflows during that period.
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