eToro’s CEO speculates on what’s driving the crypto bull market
EToro’s CEO, Yoni Assia, thinks multiple factors are at play when it comes to the crypto market’s current bull run — among them, the economic situation in the United States amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think there is a confluence of circumstances that’s leading for this all-time high, both in crypto, as well in the stock markets,” Assia told Cointelegraph in an interview on Thursday. “We’re seeing unprecedented monetary and fiscal sort of reactions from federal governments all around the world leading to zero interest rates, and even negative interest rates in some places.”
Back in March 2020, Bitcoin (BTC) dropped below $4,000 as COVID-19 prevention measures made global headlines. Since then, however, the crypto market has roared upward, with Bitcoin reaching milestone prices in excess of $60,000 and an overall market capitalization of over $1 trillion.
“We’re seeing an unprecedented amount of money being printed by governments all around the world — some of them in a very unique and new concept of direct stimulus checks to consumers,” Assia said. “That has definitely raised the biggest discussion in human history about the value of money — a discussion that started very passionately within the crypto space,” he added, while also mentioning Bitcoin’s scarcity.
Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million coins, though not all of these have been distributed as of yet. Every 10 minutes or so, a set number of new coins from this allocation are released into the ecosystem as a reward for miners who contribute to the network. As time goes on, however, the number of coins earmarked for distribution will only go down; in the past decade, the block reward has dropped from 50 BTC to 6.5 BTC. Eventually, there will be no more coins entering circulation, despite a strong, ongoing precedent for increasing investor demand.
The network’s inherent scarcity is an easy enough concept for normal folks to understand, according to Assia, who further noted that folks are not blind to excessive money-printing and low interest rates in the traditional fiat markets. He also pointed out that crypto and stock purchases are now more globally available to retail buyers, spurring mass-scale involvement from people who may not previously have participated.
He reasoned that these factors have also ignited “a renewed interest that hasn’t been seen before since December 2017, so since crypto rally 1.0, we haven’t seen so much interest in cryptocurrency as we are seeing right now with crypto rally 2.0 upon us.”
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