Bitcoin soared to an all-time high on Tuesday, the latest roller-coaster rally for the world’s biggest digital currency.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal citing data from the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, the price briefly surpassed the $69,000 mark and reached its all-time high of $68,990.90 on November 10, 2021. exceeded.

The price of Bitcoin has risen dramatically over the past year due to regulatory approval for digital currency exchange traded funds.

For many years, retail investors who wanted to trade digital currencies typically had to go to a crypto exchange, which could be a hindrance to trading for people unfamiliar with Bitcoin.

That all changed in January when federal regulators decided that retail investors in the United States could buy and sell spot Bitcoin ETFs the same way they trade stocks.

This move discouraged most Americans from investing in Bitcoin, including potential investors who didn’t fully understand what Bitcoin was or how it worked, let alone how to buy or sell it. You can now access it. Trading has begun in earnest.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has voted to allow the public sale of exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Tuesday’s record price “marks a turning point for cryptocurrencies,” said Nathan McCauley, CEO and co-founder of crypto platform Anchorage Digital. “We now know exactly what happens when markets have secure and compliant access to the asset class, and financial institutions are just getting started.”

SEC Approves Bitcoin ETF , paving the way for public transactions. For the uninitiated,
ETFs are investment vehicles similar to mutual funds. These are traded on stock exchanges and typically represent a particular index or “basket” of stocks, bonds, or commodities. A mutual fund acts like a stock whose price fluctuates throughout the trading day, but a mutual fund trade once a day at a single price of $17,000 at the start. About last year.

According to Reuters, the new ETF is listed on the Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Options Exchange, all highly regulated exchanges.

By investing in the Spot Bitcoin ETF, investors can realize the potential returns from Bitcoin without directly taking on the risks associated with owning Bitcoin, investment experts say.

Owning Bitcoin directly means storing your Bitcoin in a digital “wallet”. According to Investopedia, using a wallet means managing passkeys, or encrypted strings of letters and numbers, that allow you to transfer cryptocurrencies. Wallets can be an attractive target for hackers, and the system is not federally regulated.

The federal securities agency had rejected previous offers for a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), citing concerns that Bitcoin was vulnerable to manipulation and fraud. The industry has been pursuing ETF trading for more than a decade. The 4,444 Bitcoin ETFs approved for trading include Fidelity and BlackRock. The 4,444 applications approved this year came from 11 issuers, including well-known investment firms such as BlackRock and Fidelity.

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Two out of five SEC commissioners voted against the decision. One of them, Democrat Caroline Crenshaw, called the vote “incredibly ahistorical” in her statement.