The last time the price of bitcoin hit $20,000 was December of 2017. But Matt Luongo, the CEO of a crypto venture builder, points out to NBC News that this time the market is seeing “significant, high-conviction plays from [a few] large funds and even CEOs of publicly traded companies.”

“Names like Guggenheim Partners, [hedge fund managers] Paul Tudor Jones and Stan Druckenmiller, and the recent support from Michael Saylor at Microstrategies and Jack Dorsey at Square and Twitter are telling,” he said. S&P Dow Jones also announced this month that it will launch cryptocurrency indices in 2021, paving the way for cryptocurrencies to become more mainstream investments.

Beyond the swing of high-profile supporters, there isn’t a way to tell who is buying bitcoin. However, the number of new bitcoin addresses, the unique identifiers where the assets are sent, recently hit a record of 25,000 per hour for the first time since January 2018, according to data intelligence firm Glassnode.

Luongo ultimately argues to NBC that “This growth represents real adoption, and it won’t disappear when the next bubble bursts.”

To get a counter-balancing second opinion, NBC also spoke to the creator of the YouTube channel “Crypto Bobby,” who also notes that PayPal (as well as the stock-trading app Robinhood) have also added support for bitcoin.
Sometimes NBC refers to the two men as “crypto enthusiasts” — but other times they’re just referred to as “experts.”

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Source:: Slashdot