Bitcoin Jumps 5% In A Matter Of Hours

Sunday saw Bitcoin jump 5% in a matter of hours capping off a week of slow-but-steady momentum. Yesterday the token's value climbed as high as $48.2k — a new 2022 high — and is currently trading hands at $47.5k, an 11% climb week-on-week. This move coincides to an extent with other risk-on markets, including a 4% week-on-week increase for Nasdaq-100.

Crypto analysts suggest that momentum is a product of growing bitcoin spot market demand, with some attributing a sizeable part of this to the recent high-profile bitcoin acquisitions of Luna Foundation Guard (LFG). The trades have garnered much attention and are part of a promised $10bn bolstering of reserves for the UST stablecoin. A wallet linked to the organization has been accumulating $125m worth of bitcoins every day since the 22nd, although this represents only 0.4% of the past 7 days' exchange traded spot volume.

Network hashrate is flat week-on-week, the 14-day moving average remaining at 204 EH/s. Unadjusted from last week, difficulty is set to increase 5% from 27.5T to a new all-time high of 28.8T on Thursday. This adjustment will take some of the steam out of hash price's recent BTC-induced run, currently valued at $0.22 for the first time since mid-January. This represents a near 30% month-on-month appreciation in the value of miners' hashing — if bitcoin can maintain momentum, expect some decent profit growth. Happy mining!

For an in-depth look at how bitcoin mining has evolved since inception, read our latest article Arms Race: An Economic History of Bitcoin Mining.