Hassan Maishera
TL;DR
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Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $70k on Friday before retracing and now trades above $68k.
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BlackRock now holds 195,985 bitcoins, surpassing MicroStrategy’s total holdings.
BlackRock Surpasses MicroStrategy’s BTC Holdings
Bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency by market cap, is trading above the $68k level after losing 1% of its value in the last 24 hours. BTC set another all-time high price of $70,008 on Friday, before crashing to the $67k region shortly after.
BREAKING: $70,000 #Bitcoin
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) March 8, 2024
However, BTC is now recovering and is currently trading at $68,470 per coin. The recovery comes as BlackRock continues to mop up more bitcoins in the market. Its IBIT Bitcoin ETF is currently the largest and the asset manager continues to purchase more bitcoins as more institutional investors enter the market.
The asset manager's spot fund added roughly bitcoins Friday, bringing total holdings to 195,985 tokens. This means that BlackRock now holds more bitcoins than MicroStrategy, which currently holds 193,000 tokens.
Over the last few weeks, BlackRock's IBIT has added hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin daily, establishing itself as the largest spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
With Bitcoin underperforming, the major altcoins are also trading in the red zone. However, BNB, Binance’s native coin, is up by nearly 5% in the last 24 hours and is now trading above $510 per coin.
The total cryptocurrency market cap remains above $2.5 trillion despite losing 2% of its value over the last couple of hours.
