Bitcoin price breaks above $6,000 as global equities gyrate under coronavirus weight

Bitcoin has surged above $6,000 for the first time since last Thursday's global market turmoil.

The cryptocurrency's appears to have decoupled itself from the slowly recovering equities market, at least for now.

Bitcoin had been closely tracking equity performance since last Thursday when both markets tumbled amid fears about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy. At the time, bitcoin prices tanked as much as 50% from slightly shy of $8,000 to the $5,000 range and S&P 500 index plunged 9.5%. 

At press time, bitcoin is trading at roughly $6,230 on Coinbase, representing a more than 20% increase in the past day.

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The U.S. stock market, on the other hand, is undergoing a slower climb, with both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 up around 1.7% on news that central banks around the world are deploying emergency measures to combat the coronavirus impact.

Source: TradingView; Bitcoin prices in orange, S&P 500 in blue

"Begining on March 12th, the price of bitcoin was linked to the U.S. stock market. However, at 3 p.m. yesterday, they started to decouple. From this perspective, I feel that bitcoin has come out of the liquidity crisis of the U.S. stocks this time," said Flex Yang, co-founder and CEO of Babel Finance, a crypto-financial services firm based in Asia. 

Meanwhile, ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is trading at about $135 on Coinbase, representing an approximately 20 percent increase in the past 24 hours.

About Author

Celia joined The Block as a reporter after earning her BA in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. Having spent years pondering over why 2+2 cannot equal 5, she is interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics, computation, and cryptography. She also had a very brief stint at Crunchbase News.