Bitcoin Hits 2-Month High as G20 Ministers See No Urgency to Further Regulate Cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin is having a relatively good time—on Monday it hit a two-month high of $ 7,820, although at the time of writing it had subsided slightly to $ 7,700, which still represents a 3.3% boost over the last 24 hours.
The leading cryptocurrency has gained about a fifth in value over the last week, as it continues its recovery from the $ 5,900 level it hit in late June.
At the moment, Bitcoin is outperforming all of its most significant rivals, with Bitcoin Cash—a spinoff that was created almost a year ago—coming the closest at 2.4% growth over the last day.
Over the weekend, G20 finance ministers met in Argentina, and cryptocurrency was one of the subjects under discussion. In the resulting communiqué, the G20 said cryptocurrencies do not “pose a global financial stability risk” at the moment, but it was important to remain vigilant.
As it said back in March, the group of wealthy countries wants to harmonize international regulations on cryptocurrency to some degree. On Sunday, it asked the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—an international body for fighting money laundering and terrorist financing—to “clarify in October 2018 how its standards apply to crypto-assets.”
So if there’s any coordinated crackdown on cryptocurrencies on the horizon, it’s still some way off. Perhaps that news is feeding into the current positivity around Bitcoin—after all, it was regulatory crackdowns in China and South Korea that brought Bitcoin down from its almost-$ 20,000 highs of last December—but really, as is so often the case, it’s hard to tell precisely what is fuelling the cryptocurrency’s fortunes.
