Bitcoin hits new high

SIBILE MARCELLUS: Bitcoin has been having a field day, reaching a record $28,600, and there’s only one more full day of trading left in 2020. Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre joins us, brings us into his crypto corner. Jared, take it away.

JARED BLIKRE: Well, I’ll tell you what. Three years ago we had the crypto corner under the stairwell at our old office, and now I’m in a corner. And with the help of YFi Interactive, yes, indeed, I am in the crypto corner.

Let’s check out Bitcoin, up another 3 and 1/2%, nearly touching $29,000. It was only two weeks ago that it first passed $20,000. It took the Dow over two years to complete the same move, and I’m waiting to see if it can hit $30,000 by close of business tomorrow. That would be a record for the year.

But you know what? There is some other news that we’re following here. XRP has had a terrible run. It’s down another 4% today. You look over the trailing month, down 68%. And now Coinbase has been sued by a group of investors. Should be a class-action suit over what the alleged illegal XRP sales.

So what this involves is the SEC sued Ripple, which distributed and created XRP tokens. That was last week, and now this week we’re seeing this continue into the private space. And the investors are alleging that Coinbase should have known that these XRP tokens were actually securities. Big question for me is does the SEC step in and also kind of second guess Coinbase here? We’ll have to wait and see.

We also got some other news. The US and a company called BitGo are settling over sanctions violations. And this comes from OFAC, and this has to do with a company that offers noncustodial secure digital wallet-management services, and they’ve agreed to remit about $100,000 to serve its civil penalty. That’s because they allowed users, customers in regions around the world where OFAC has sanctions against them, regions like Crimea of Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria.

So all of this put together, I think it just shows that the space is maturing. There’s going to be some legal ramifications. The XRP-Ripple news kind of came out of left space, but it’s really not interrupting the flow of money into Bitcoin as we head into the end of the year here, Sibile.

source:finance.yahoo.com