Beginning its current glorious bull run at the start of the second week of October when it was valued at $10,500, Bitcoin has today passed the $30k benchmark on a swift and unimpeded rise. Key milestones gave its network an early Christmas, with the price marching from $21,000 on December 16 to over $25,000 by boxing day.

After a year that gave rise to frequent and punctual articles proclaiming new all-time highs, Bitcoin’s ascent has been keenly observed by commentators, who attribute it to a slew of high-profile institutional investors including Anthony Scaramucci, MassMutual and Michael Saylor, who poured more than $1 billion into Bitcoin through his company MicroStrategy. 

Whether it will continue to rise remains open to speculation, though after it briefly flipped the market cap of outspoken crypto-critic Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, it seems likely Bitcoin will turn even hardened skeptics. It currently sits above Visa, Mastercard and JP Morgan in terms of market capitalization. 

On the other side of the crypto coin (ha!), XRP suffered a historic collapse before the turn of the new year, suffering a 93% downturn in what is perceived as the third largest collapse of all time. XRP’s bleak outlook was compounded at the end of last month when the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Ripple over security violations.

One big hitter on Bitcoin’s coattails recently has been Ethereum, which rose by the same amount as Bitcoin in the final week of 2020. 

All the best for 2021!