Bitcoin news live: Price rally pushes BTC past four-year milestone

After returning above $3,000 for the first time since the start of the month, Ethereum (ETH) continues to hover just above the key level.

It marks a major recovery for the world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency, which was trading at around $2,000 just one week ago.

We’ve heard from Will Hamilton, head of trading and research at Trovio Capital Management, who offered his thoughts on the latest price rally and recent developments for ETH.

“Enthusiasm has started to mount again as Ethereum prepares for its long awaited merge with Beacon chain, completing the protocol’s transition to an energy efficient POS ‘Proof of Stake’ consensus mechanism,” he said. “The Ethereum token emission schedule will undergo significant adjustments as daily output decreases up to 9 per cent. The reduction in emissions will be combined with a continuation of the Ethereum burn mechanism introduced with EIP-1559, the mechanism destroys Ethereum correlated with the base fee of each transaction on the network.”

The dominoes may be beginning to topple in Central America, with El Salvador’s neighbour Honduras reportedly lining up a move to make bitcoin legal tender.

President Xiomara Castro was quoted as saying that El Salvador shouldn’t be the only country “escaping dollar hegemony.

Crypto commentator Max Keiser, who recently met with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, may have some inside insight on this, tweeting: “It’s happening…”

The overall supply of bitcoin on crypto exchanges has fallen to its lowest level in more than three years, leading some hopeful investors to believe this may be just the start of the rally.

Data from blockchain analytics firm Santiment noted: “Bitcoin’s ratio of supply sitting on exchanges continues dropping hard, down to its lowest level since December 2018. There is 13.5 per cent less BTC on these exchange wallets compared to just two months ago, amounting to 1.6 per cent less of the overall supply.”

Malaysia’s communications ministry has called on the government to legalise cryptocurrency and adopt them as legal tender.

The Ministry of Communications and Multimedia urged Malaysian regulators to push forward with crypto adoption in order to make the country an Asian hub for the sector and encourage adoption among young people.

“We hope the government can try to legalize this matter so that we can expand the participation of young people in cryptocurrencies and help them in terms of energy consumption,” deputy communications minister Datuk Zahidi Abidin said.

Analysts have often noted how bitcoin appears to follow a four-year cycle, with peaks and troughs fitting into this pattern.

Some have attributed it to the way the cryptocurrency was created, whereby roughly every four years the mining rewards are halved. Whatever the reason, the phenomenon means that anyone who has ever bought bitcoin and held it for at least four years has never lost money.

It also typically means that bitcoin rarely ever trades below its four-year moving average, which has just passed $20,000 – the all-time high seen at the peak of the last cycle in 2017. As one commenter pointed out, “the 2017 top is now the absolute bottom!”

The latest period of calm across the crypto market has given some investors hope that bitcoin and other leading cryptocurrencies are in a period of consolidation ahead of another rally.

One of these is Greg Beard, a noted Wall Street investor who made a name for himself trading in the natural resources sector, who told Fortune this week that he believed bitcoin could hit $200,000 by the start of 2027.

“It’s hard to know where bitcoin’s price will be at, say, the end of the year,” he said. “But if you’re a fundamental-style investor that believes in bitcoin as a store of value, it should be worth multiples of today’s price in five years, I’d say at least five times.”

(It’s worth noting that analysis from Glassnode earlier this week warned that a “capitulation event” may also be on its way if short-term holders decide to cut their losses.)

Bitcoin has managed to hold and consolidate the price gains it made yesterday that pushed it above $40,000, but still remains in limbo.

Pseudonymous analyst PlanB – who has racked up more than 1.5 million Twitter followers over the last year despite his Stock-to-Flow projections occasionally being overly optimistic – predicts that the current market stasis could be about to be severely disrupted with a major upwards movement.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to legalise bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies comes just six months after he vetoed the bill.

Circumstances have changed a lot since then for the Eastern European country, with Russia’s invasion prompting a flood of crypto donations to assist in their defence and humanitarian efforts. Zelensky’s signing of the “Virtual Assets” bill on Wednesday comes after cryptocurrency donations surpassed $100 million.

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