Bitcoin (BTC) sold for over $50,000 in Tuesday morning trading, another all-time high in its latest bull run.
The digital asset reached a high of $50,689.18 before 8 AM EST at Binance, the largest market for BTC with over 5% of its daily volume, according to CoinMarketCap — a price data site owned by Binance.
BTC began this year at a value around $29,000, up from about $7,000 a year before. In December, it broke an all-time high set in its 2017 bull run, finally hitting $20,000 as new institutional investors and high-profile corporations such as PayPal began buying in.
Historically, Bitcoin has grown in cycles of parabolic ascent and “crashes” down to prices far above the previous cycle’s highs. The asset has undergone two major bear markets — in 2014 and 2018 — corresponding to its “halving,” a feature of the software that slows the system’s monetary supply growth by half roughly every four years. After each cut to the issuance rate, the resulting scarcity when buying newly-minted Bitcoins has led to record-high prices and sharp corrections.
