It has seen its value quintuple in the past year.

Bitcoin cryptocurrency broke a new record on Tuesday, February 16, crossing the $ 50,000 threshold on the financial markets.

At around 12:35 GMT (13:35 in Paris), bitcoin rose to $ 50,547.70, an all-time high.

It then fell back to cost, at around 12:55 GMT, $ 49,505.35, up 2.7% on the session and more than 70% since the start of the year - and this while it had already had an exceptional year in 2020.

>> To see: "Bitcoin, a new safe haven?"

Business enthusiasm

While some observers are wary of the volatility of this decentralized market that is not based on any assets, others believe that the situation is very different from 2017, when prices climbed with the same enthusiasm before crashing in early 2018.

“The growing interest of the business community in cryptocurrencies has transformed the market compared to 2017,” comments Neil Wilson, analyst at Markets.com.

Last week, electric car maker Tesla surprised by announcing that it had invested $ 1.5 billion of its cash in bitcoin.

Elon Musk, boss of Tesla and the richest man in the world, does not hesitate to praise the merits of cryptocurrencies on social networks.

>> To read also: "Tesla bets on bitcoin: revelation or opportunism?"

On Tuesday, the MicroStrategy group, a mid-sized American software publisher that made the bet at the end of 2020 to invest heavily in bitcoin, to allow Wall Street investors to bet on cryptocurrency by buying their shares, announced a lifting of funds of $ 600 million "to buy bitcoins".

In addition, banking and financial groups are increasingly interested in bitcoin: the oldest bank on Wall Street, BNY Mellon, and MasterCard took over last week from the giant BlackRock or the payment service PayPal, which all announced new cryptocurrency projects in recent months.

The cryptocurrency market, however, is not unanimous: several central bankers, such as Andrew Bailey in the United Kingdom, have dismissed the idea of ​​considering bitcoin as a currency in its own right, or even as a "digital gold" that would be used to conserve wealth.

With AFP

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