Bitcoin—the first cryptocurrency ever created—has just touched a new record high price on the top crypto exchange.
It has still not crossed $20,000 however, which has long been seen as the all-time high.
Binance—the cryptocurrency exchange with the highest volume—pointed out Bitcoin’s new all-time high in a tweet sent on Nov. 30. Market data available on TradingView indicates that the coin touched a price of $19,869 per BTC after 3 PM UTC.
Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted “Slap yourself for selling #bitcoin, ever!”
Gemini exchange CEO Tyler Winklevoss made the same claim, tweeting out “Onward and upward we go to the moon!”
The new record price is just the continuation of an earlier bullish trend. As Modern Consensus reported earlier today, Bitcoin recovered after a recent sudden $3,000 crash. Still, some question the support as the coin left over $2,000 of unfilled Chicago Mercantile Exchange Bitcoin Futures trading gap, which usually leads to traders expecting a correction.
Mainstream adoption supercharges Bitcoin’s growth
Bitcoin saw increasingly fast growth after—in late June—digital payments behemoth PayPal started being rumored to be working on preparing to start directly selling cryptocurrencies to its 325 million users. The market reacted with enthusiasm when in late October PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman confirmed the rumors saying that the “shift to digital forms of currencies is inevitable.”
Earlier this month, the service launched for United States PayPal users, who can now buy and sell Bitcoin, Ether (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC) in their accounts. Since then, PayPal has played a way more direct role in fueling Bitcoin’s growth.
An analysis by crypto venture capital firm Panthera Capital suggests that PayPal was “already buying almost 70% of the new supply of Bitcoins” on Nov. 20. And that’s in a situation where Square’s Cash App was already estimated to be buying around 40% of all newly-issued Bitcoin, meaning that the two firms are buying 10% more BTC than the miners are creating.
And those investments are seemingly paying off for the companies involved. As Modern Consensus reported earlier this month, Square’s Cash App made $1.6B on Bitcoin transactions this quarter alone.