Bitcoin (BTC) expansion in the last months has been pushed by several companies entering the crypto market and purchasing BTC, and other virtual currencies. This has allowed the price of Bitcoin to reach massively high prices. Indeed, the virtual currency surpassed $60,000 a few weeks ago and, in the future, it could surpass these levels.
But that’s not all. We cannot consider that the recent bull market was driven just by institutions. There has also been a strong influence from retail investors that acquired and purchased BTC and other virtual currencies on a regular basis. Projects, decentralized applications (dApps), decentralized finance (DeFi) and even online casinos have been helping the market move forward.
Bitcoin Continues Moving Higher
If you were thinking that the bull market has been driven by institutions you were right. We have seen how companies such as MicroStrategy, MassMutual or even Tesla acquired BTC during 2020 and 2021. However, smaller and retail investors have also been investing in the most popular virtual currency in the world.
Projects and gambling sites accepting Bitcoin have attracted new users. Indeed, the Bitcoin betting industry has strongly expanded over the last years. Online casinos are accepting not only Bitcoin but also other digital assets.
With these waves of investors coming from both sectors, we see that it was possible for BTC to reach a large number of users. Nowadays, Bitcoin is used as a hedge against inflation and fiat currencies, as a digital asset to send and receive transfers, as a currency to pay for goods and services and many other things.
Thus, the influence of retail investors and institutional traders has been steadily growing. This could continue in the future if Bitcoin reaches a new all-time high. But there are some challenges that BTC must handle before it is able to become the leader it wants to be.
Bitcoin Challenges
As we said, there are some challenges that Bitcoin must face in order to continue moving forward. One of them is related to scalability. Nowadays, retail users that want to send and receive a transaction have to pay very high fees and transactions take a long time to be processed.
However, there are several projects that want to make Bitcoin faster and easier to use. One of them is called the Lightning Network (LN). Several crypto-related companies are already using it in order to make transfers easier and faster.
This could be very useful for users that enjoy playing online casino games or that would like to use Bitcoin on a daily basis for other things such as paying for goods and services.
Another challenge could be related to its energy consumption. Nonetheless, this has been more than addressed by the community, showing the different benefits Bitcoin offers.