Bitcoin climbed on Thursday, erasing some of its 18% plunge since Friday as investors signaled the selloff may have been overdone.
Hours after the world’s largest cryptocurrency closed at a fresh low for the year, buyers began pushing up the price, which reached US$6 483.95 as of 2.49pm South African time. Rival digital tokens ethereum and litecoin also gained, while ripple rose as much as 7.2%.
The market leader’s slump since last week coincided with a string of negative news, including the release on Wednesday of a study suggesting its price may have been manipulated through trading in a cryptocurrency called tether during last year’s record surge.
Tether, currently the number 12 crypto by market value, was the second most traded globally in the past 24 hours, Coinmarketcap data shows. Each coin is supposed to be backed by $1 of fiat money in a bank.
Bitcoin’s share of the $280-billion virtual currency market has hovered in the 30-40% range this year as new coins are added every few days, according to data from Coinmarketcap, which tracks 1 628 cryptocurrencies. Abyss, Hurify and Engine are among tokens added to market sites over the past few days alone. — Reported by Todd White, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP
