Bitcoin rallied on Monday night above the $2800 mark, eclipsing the previous all-time high of $2760, which was recorded on May 24, 2017. On European exchange Bitstamp, the digital currency was trading as high as $2877.47 USD at 1:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning.
It remains unclear what spurred investors to pile into bitcoin with so much gusto. However, volume data from
CoinMarketCap.com indicates that Korean investors played a significant role in the recent rally.
Korean exchange Bithumb saw $68 million dollars - almost 4 percent of global cryptocurrency turnover - pass through its BTC/KRW trading pair over the past 24h. Bithumb’s volumes surpassed those of American & European exchanges. While major Chinese digital currency exchanges Huobi, BTCC and OKCoin, accounted for 8.6 percent of global bitcoin trading.
Additionally, bitcoin’s wild rally over the past two days may have been fueled by the recent mining difficulty adjustment. On June 4th, the competition between miners for new coins became even more heated after the mining difficulty jumped by 13.9 percent. This was the second-largest bump in mining difficulty since the start of the year!
The Bitcoin network automatically adjusts the mining difficulty number every two weeks to maintain a minting rate of 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes. And since the last adjustment on the 23rd of May, many new miners have entered the race to uncover more of the “digital gold.”
In fact, Blockchain statistics portal
Bitcoin Wisdom estimates the next difficulty adjustment, which is scheduled sometime in mid-June, to be in the neighborhood of 14 percent.
Bitcoin miners image by
ApolitikNow
