I think it is fair to say that last week was one of the best weeks that the cryptocurrency market has had in a long time.
From its low on Monday of last week, the crypto market has pushed higher by an incredible 26.8% to US$327.8 billion today according to Coin Market Cap.
The strong performance of the bitcoin (BTC) price has played a key role in this gain. It climbed by 20.6% during the period to US$8142.49 per coin.
In the process, this lifted its market capitalisation from US$114.6 billion up to just under US$138.3 billion today.
Surprisingly, this gain came despite a Bank of America analyst calling bitcoin the biggest bubble in history and suggesting that it would pop imminently at the start of last week.
Has the bitcoin price bottomed?
That's the million-dollar question. In the medium-term it's close to impossible to know, but there are signs that in the near-term it could have bottomed.
Last week bitcoin experienced its largest ever one-hour trade volume when its price shot up by over US$1,000 in a little over 30 minutes.
During that short period over US$1 billion of the cryptocurrency was snapped up in a buying frenzy. As a comparison, over the last 24 hours the volume of bitcoin traded has been worth US$5.4 billion.
There has been no official word on who was buying, but there is speculation that the massive buy order came from a bitcoin "whale" or a large institutional investor. Whoever it was, though, clearly is bullish on the cryptocurrency given the volume traded.
This may also bode well for altcoins such as Ripple (XRP), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and EOS (EOS). Although each of these altcoins have triggers of their own, they tend to rise and fall with the bitcoin price as well. So, if bitcoin starts booming again, I expect they will too.
Things are looking good for the industry at the moment, but we have seen many times before how sentiment can shift very quickly. My advice would be to approach bitcoin and its fellow altcoins with caution.
