Bitcoin reached a massive US$7583 value by late last week, but dropped dramatically on Monday

Late last week Bitcoin soared past the US$7000 mark as it skyrocketed from US$6750 (approx.) to US$7410 from opening on Wednesday to late-Friday, hitting US$7583 over the weekend before sinking back rapidly on Monday to US$6952 (accurate at the time of writing, daily trading is still happening now). This is phenomenal growth for a cryptocurrency which sat at US$5000 less than a month ago (12th October), US$4000 two months ago (mid-August), and around US$2600 during the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash fork in early August.

While part of the earlier growth can be attributed to speculation around the currency fork, this newest increase is most likely due to CME Group announcing plans to support Bitcoin future contracts. As the world’s largest exchange operator this apparent support for a traditional investment method is seen as a vote of confidence in the cryptocurrency.

Another factor that is being speculated on is the mid-November update to the software that supports Bitcoin (SegWit2x), which could potentially cause another fork that might have a similar effect as the earlier creation of Bitcoin Cash, where all owners of the original currency received an equal amount of the new currency.

Bitcoin’s growth is incredible, with the currency now making up 61.5 percent of the value of the entire cryptocurrency market. The more important long-term question will be how well this value is maintained, or if we are watching the growth towards a ‘dotcom bubble’ style market crash in the future.