Bitcoin Struggles to Regain $4,000 Level Starting the New Year: BTCManager’s Week in Review Jan 7

price of bitcoin traded sideways in the first few days of 2019. The price fluctuated between $3,707 and $3,947 and closed the week effectively unchanged versus last week’s close.

As expected, news flow over New Year’s was muted as the first week of January is still a holiday week for most businesses as investors seem to have taken a wait-and-see approach on how the first few trading weeks of the year will unfold before placing large buy orders.

The biggest news of the week has been the announcement from Bakkt that it raised $182.5 million for its platform and Overstock’s intention to pay part of its taxes in bitcoin using OhioCrypto, a state-sponsored platform which lets businesses remit taxes using cryptocurrency. Both headlines show that there is ample support for bitcoin in the U.S., both as a currency and as an investment asset.

Ethereum, on the other hand, got off to a better start. Driven by the upcoming release of the Constantinople upgrade, the price of ether (ETH) has experienced a substantial rally from a low of $83 in mid-December to currently trading at $158. Week-on-week, ETH rallied by 15 percent