With bankruptcies, job cuts and arrests packed into the first few weeks of the year, the crypto industry looked set to pick up right where it left off after a disastrous 2022. But it’s not all doom and gloom for the tumultuous world of digital assets. In just a month and change, roughly $300bn has been tacked on to the market value of crypto assets, sending it back above $1tn. Bitcoin has surged more than 40 per cent to roughly $23,000, rebounding from the drop to $16,000 per token, which marred the flagship cryptocurrency in the wake of FTX’s bankruptcy last year. Bitcoin’s chief rival token ether is also firmly in the green, while Solana — the beleaguered “ethereum killer” that all but died last year — has registered an eye-popping 140 per cent increase in value so far in 2023. CryptoCompare figures also show the total assets under management for digital asset investment products increased almost 37 per cent in January to more than $26bn, the highest since May 2022 — the month when crypto’s unprecedented crisis of confidence began. Grayscale’s GBTC — an investment trust designed to track the price of bitcoin — last month notched up $38.9mn in average daily volume, a 23 per cent rise from December, according to the crypto data provider.
Full opinion : Crypto is back with $300bn frenzy.
