Cryptocurrency is booming again with Bitcoin back

ABC NEWS (Australia)

After a sensational crash, the world's most recognisable cryptocurrency is booming again. The market price of bitcoin is back to almost half of its former glory and other cryptocurrencies are along for the ride.

Transcript

00:00 Bitcoin is booming again. It was once at 65,000 US dollars a coin as they call them at its

00:10 peak around 2021 April. It crashed spectacularly as there was a range of scandals such as FTX's

00:18 collapse and the collapse of Solana. And then we now in the last couple of months have seen

00:24 Bitcoin actually inch up again. It's nowhere near back up to the 65,000 US dollars a coin

00:31 that it once was, but it is around almost or more than half of that so far and it still

00:36 appears to be rising. All other sorts of cryptocurrencies such as Solana or Ethereum or even the much

00:43 derided Dogecoin are also rising. In the last month those smaller coins have been going

00:49 up around 8-11% in a month which is quite substantial. There seems to be a lot of talk

00:55 about exactly why this could be happening. There's no one pinpoint of exactly any reason.

01:02 Some people who are cynics about cryptocurrencies say it's inherently speculative and not really

01:06 backed by anything. So it's pretty hard to see why these currencies are rising again.

01:12 There are several reasons. Currently FTX's Sam Beekman-Fryd is in court and some analysts

01:18 are saying that potentially this is easing concerns about the market. We've also seen

01:22 more regulation globally into cryptocurrencies which might be easing concerns about it. But

01:27 also one big reason is because we've seen a very, very large firm called BlackRock have

01:34 an application for a license to set up a fund in Bitcoin. It must be said that really this

01:39 is just a rumor as to whether it's actually going to start this fund, but that appears

01:43 to be enough to really influence this market. Analysts aren't quite sure if the Bitcoin

01:48 price will get up to its major highs again, but definitely a lot of investors are getting

01:52 pretty excited again.

01:54 And you interviewed a retail investor Amelia who put some retirement savings into crypto.

01:58 How are they going?

01:59 Yes, I interviewed a lovely guy called Mark. He put in, he believes more than 50,000 Australian

02:07 currency into crypto markets at the peak of the boom in 2021. Here is Mark talking about

02:14 that journey.

02:15 Well, I was typically investor on a hype, the same was starting to happen now back in

02:21 '21, roughly in April, everyone was talking about a crypto and I thought, what am I missing

02:27 on? So I quickly jump in not realizing that it's totally wrong time to get into it.

02:33 So what's the advice for investors, Amelia?

02:37 Well investors like Mark, they're getting excited, potentially they could get some of

02:41 their savings back. I spoke to the head of a crypto exchange firm called Digital X. They

02:47 said that, of course, people are getting excited. They are urging investors to think wisely

02:53 before putting significant amounts of money into this sort of volatile cryptocurrency

02:59 market. They said they wouldn't advise people to put more than 5% of their portfolio in

03:02 cryptocurrency. I myself have done stories in the last year about people who've lost

03:07 self-managed super funds being wrapped up in cryptocurrencies. So people are urging

03:12 a word of caution and reminding people that while we might be feeling there's more regulation

03:17 heading for cryptocurrency, that we aren't actually there yet.

03:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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