Over the last 48 hours, following a large loss on Christmas, the Bitcoin price has recovered back to around $4,000.
The dominant cryptocurrency, which still holds a market valuation of over $64 billion, has demonstrated wild volatility in a wide price range from $3,100 to $4,300 throughout December, struggling to recover to November levels.
Last month, the cryptocurrency market was valued at around $220 billion. As of December 28, the valuation of cryptocurrencies remains at $133 billion, down $87 billion within a 30-day span.
Key to the Recovery of Bitcoin
According to Francis Pouliot, the CEO and co-founder of Bull Bitcoin, a company based in Canada, the asset will recover as individuals continue to build on top of the protocol and the infrastructure supporting the currency strengthens.
Throughout the past nine years, Bitcoin has consistently survived major corrections, which on some occasions worse than the 2018 bear market, as the builders, developers, and companies prepared to support the next wave of investors and users during a market downturn.
Pouliot said:
The way I see the price of Bitcoin: there are fundamental psychological, economics and social tenants that seem to create a similar pattern. Price rises fast, crashers down but at higher ladder with the new skin in the game added as value hodlers is discovered by the market. As an investor my these focus on the tail of distribution of Bitcoin network/ecosystem participants. Top new people active with skin+soul in the game, momentum, influence, resources, commitment, ideology, full nodes, sovereignty. It is People that give Bitcoin its value.
Cryptocurrencies were not present in the past when the global market demonstrated signs of a full-blown recession, and as such, the narrative of Bitcoin as a safe haven asset is yet to be tested by the market.
However, with leading economists expecting the U.S. stock market to face larger sell-offs in the first quarter of 2019 triggered by the rising Federal Reserve interest rate and the trade war between the U.S. and China, Bitcoin could serve as an alternative means of payment and long-term investment throughout the years to come.
On Time Magazine, Alex Gladstein the chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation, wrote:
To be sure, Bitcoin is still a nascent technology, and doesn’t offer cutting-edge usability, speed, or privacy. But engineers are constantly working to bring those attributes to Bitcoin by building better apps and on-ramps, upgrading the base protocol, and creating new second layer technologies like the Lightning Network, which could eventually mask and dramatically scale the number of possible bitcoin transactions per second.
Risk of Future Crash Declines
Throughout the past two years, many cryptocurrency-focused hedge funds have emerged with the intent of holding onto crypto assets as a long-term investment.
In the long run, Pouliot emphasized that as these hedge funds acquire tens of thousands of Bitcoin, the circulating supply of the digital asset will decline, restricting the potential amount of Bitcoin investors could buy in the public market.
