The price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was holding steady around $27,000 on Tuesday, less than a week after BlackRock filed an application with the Securities and Exchange Commission to create a Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund.
Partnering with U.S.-based crypto exchange Coinbase and financial services giant Nasdaq, the firm hopes to give retail investors the ability to buy into Bitcoin’s daily price swings through ordinary brokerage accounts—a potentially game-changing development that would expose Bitcoin to trillions more in capital.
Shortly after news of BlackRock’s application on Thursday, the price of Bitcoin jumped from below $25,000 to approximately $25,500, according to data from CoinGecko. The cryptocurrency flew past $26,000 on Friday, and over the weekend, Bitcoin’s price continued to hold steady—almost breaking $27,000 on Monday. In the past week, Bitcoin is up approximately 3%.
The rebound in Bitcoin's price came just hours after the Federal Reserve announced a pause in a more-than-year-long streak of interest rate increases. In its announcement, the Fed struck a particularly hawkish tone, implying that more increases were conceivable in the near future. Shortly after, the price of Bitcoin fell dramatically, plummeting below $25,000, but with BlackRock's ETF application, Bitcoin's decline suddenly reversed.
Since the beginning of the year, the price of the world's foremost cryptocurrency has significantly increased. Beginning at approximately $16,000 in January, it almost doubled in April and crossed the $30,000 mark, the first time Bitcoin hit that threshold in almost a year.
However, with the continuing onslaught of the U.S. federal government's regulatory crackdown, Bitcoin has since sagged. In the beginning of June, the SEC filed two blockbuster lawsuits against Binance and then Coinbase, two of the world's largest crypto exchanges. Following the SEC's lawsuit against Binance, the price of Bitcoin fell from about $27,500 to below $26,000.