The price of the digital currency bitcoin crossed over the $4,000 mark for the first time in its nine-year history, despite a widespread selloff in other major digital currencies.
Bitcoin was trading Sunday morning near $4,033, according to the news and research site CoinDesk, up 3.1% on the day, and up more than 25% in August. The price, which rose as high as $4,200 Sunday morning, has more than quadrupled so far this year.
Unlike stocks and other traditional assets that trade on exchanges with set hours, bitcoin trades electronically 24-hours a day and during weekends. Its method of validating every transaction eliminates the need for a central party like a government to control the currency.
The gains Saturday and Sunday seemed to be coming at the expense of other digital currencies, many of which have been issued just this year in a developing trend called “initial coin offerings.” Startups have been issuing coins that operate as tokens for online services, and have been raising hundreds of millions of dollars. So far this year, they have raised $1.33 billion, according to research firm Smith & Crown.
A highly publicized coin offering from a firm called Protocol Labs, for a service it is building called Filecoin, raised about $250 million this week in a record token offering. The offering, which is currently ongoing, was so heavily bid that the firm was forced to suspend it after only one hour Thursday. It was reopened Saturday afternoon.
Later Saturday, coin-offering tokens and digital currencies across the board started falling, and it appeared that the liquidated capital was flowing directly into bitcoin. Of the top 20 tokens listed on the site CoinMarketCap, 18 were negative. Qtum was down 6.3%, OmiseGo was down 18%, and EOS was down 11%. Meanwhile, digital currency ether was down 5.7% at $292. Ripple was down 8.4% at 16 cents, and Bitcoin Cash—a newly created offshoot of bitcoin—was down 3.7% at $308.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-soars-past-4-000-in-weekend-trading-1502633810?mod=e2tw
