Bitcoin Hits $7,000 as Wall Street Interest Gets Real

The advance is the latest plateau for the currency

Bitcoin rose above the $7,000 mark for the first time on Thursday.

The price of the digital currency bitcoin smashed through the $7,000 mark for the first time on Thursday, a new milestone for the surging asset.

Bitcoin quickly slipped back below that mark before resuming its ascent.

Late Thursday, the digital currency was trading at $7,051, according to CoinDesk. It had traded as high as $7,355 earlier in the day.

The advance was just the latest plateau for the currency, which has surged this year despite several setbacks. Those have included a near-total ban in China and a bitter fight within the bitcoin industry over how best to expand the network.

Bitcoin’s ability to shrug off those developments shows that its trading community, which is still relatively small and insular, remains bullish.

Based on the morning high, bitcoin was up as much as 658% on the year. Thursday’s jump also came amid selling in most of the other big cryptocurrencies. Ether was down 2.9% at $289 on Thursday, ripple was down 0.7% at 20 cents, and litecoin was down 0.7% at $54. On the other hand, Bitcoin Cash, itself a near-identical copy of bitcoin, was up 16% at $588.

Bitcoin’s latest surge occurred just days after CME Group. Inc announced plans to begin offering a bitcoin futures contract, a potentially significant development that would for the first time give Wall Street traders an avenue to bet on bitcoin prices and hedge against volatility. That kind of market, which exists for more-mature assets, is believed to be a crucial ingredient in bitcoin’s move into institutional and retail markets.

Additionally, there are some nascent signs that bitcoin is starting to draw money from the gold market.First unveiled in 2008, bitcoin is a digital asset that exists across a network of linked computers that all run an identical version of the same program. The heart of that program is an open ledger of transactions.

Every bitcoin trade goes into the ledger, and each computer on the network maintains an identical, constantly updated copy of the ledger, which makes counterfeiting bitcoins impossible. There is also a limit of 21 million on the number of bitcoins that will be created.

Bitcoin’s surge also comes despite a looming event for the currency itself expected in November: a split in its software. A divisive rift in the industry between software developers and businesses has proven intractable, and later this month, the businesses are set to launch their own version of bitcoin’s software.

The two versions will look virtually identical, except for one feature: the number of transactions that can be processed per second. The second version will have a larger capacity, something businesses want to help with mainstream adoption. Once launched, both will be competing for users.