Price of Bitcoin Surges to N13m

By Adedapo Adesanya

Bitcoin crossed the N13 million mark on Sunday, December 27 as it traded at N13,250,101.40, according to Quidax, a cryptocurrency trading platform in Nigeria.

This is another milestone after it touched N11,000,000 on December 25 and N12,000,000 on December 26.

With this surge, Bitcoin’s market value has exceeded $500 billion and the world’s most popular cryptocurrency has seen an unprecedented rise this year, with its value witnessing a 240 per cent jump in 2020 alone.

The upward rally is expected to continue as Bitcoin has seen a speedy rise since it first crossed the N10 million mark for first time in early December.

Launched in 2009, Bitcoin became the first cryptocurrency to adopt a decentralised network for transactions based on blockchain. This system exempts the currency from central bank policies and regulations, thereby deriving its value through a process called mining.

Bitcoins can be transferred using peer-to-peer transactions, the data record-keeping of which are done by blockchains. As of today, Bitcoin is responsible for about 66 per cent of the global cryptocurrency market.

Recently, the cryptocurrency market had faced a potential threat when the United States’ Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) swooped down on Ripple (XRP).

XRP had seen its share of rally this year but those gains were all erased last week when it was announced that the SEC was planning to file a sweeping lawsuit against the company during the current administration’s final days.

The SEC argued that XRP had always been a security and that it should have been registered with the commission from the beginning more than seven years ago.

Traders reacted negatively to the news as XRP instantly started giving back large chunks of its gains from the previous month.

This equally drove fear across other digital tokens but that has slowly receded in recent days. The currency is currently down 3.8 per cent trading at N136.27.

But other currencies are up with Ethereum (ETH) rising by 5 per cent to trade at N310,801.05, Litecoin (LTC) up by 2.4 per cent to N62,970.08, Dash (DASH) is 0.6 per cent up to sell for N50,101.66, the US Dollar Tether (USDT) has gained one per cent to trade at N478.74, while Tron (TRX) is up by 0.1 per cent to quote at N13.22.

Market analysts believe that with the recent rally in the value of digital coins, 2021 will see an increase in regulations.