Another new all-time high reached as Bitcoin surpasses the $8K mark

Bitcoin finally hit the much anticipated $8,000 mark, giving birth to speculation that the digital currency would reach $10,000 by the end of this year.

The coin’s price reached its new all-time high of $8,040 this Friday on the cryptocurrency exchange, Bitfinex. Its value has seen frequent ups and downs lately. It was $7,200 prior to the cancellation of SegWit2x hard fork and spiked up to to $7,800 once the fork was declared officially dead. It’s interesting to see that just a few hours later, the value plummeted down to $5,500 only to have raised to $8,000 a week later.

Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, raised up from $600 to $2,600 during this time. This resulted in a lot of Bitcoin Investors shifting their funds from BTC to BCH, which further led to a heightened number of unconfirmed transactions on the network. However, soon after it was clear that bitcoin was on the rise again, and investors came back. Bitcoin Cash, consequently, dropped rapidly.

A number of notable factors have contributed to this surge. First, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) group’s announcement to launch Bitcoin futures by the end of 2017, potentially paving the way for a number of institutional investments. Moreover, US-based exchange, Coinbase, just announced that it would be launching a custodian service next year developed especially for big money investors. The Coinbase Custody service is expected to further encourage institutional investors to start to invest in the crypto-market. Lastly, the payment company, Square, has begun to allow its customers to purchases and sell Bitcoin on its Cash app. “We’re always listening to our customers and we’ve found that they are interested in using the Cash app to buy Bitcoin,” a company spokesperson said.

With the launch of CME futures and encouraged institutional investments, it would not come as a surprise if the coin succeeded in reaching $10,000 by the end of 2017. Another factor that was silently contributing to Bitcoin’s rise was SegWit2x fork.

Despite being cancelled by its developers, the split could still have been activated even if a small number of miners had decided to start it off. “Despite these developments, a small number of miners may attempt to go forward with a fork,” stated David Farmer, Coinbase’s director of communications. The reason why a hard fork was attracting investors was because it promised “free money” for them. The expected fork date, however, has passed without any significant activity.