Finance & economics | Back to the moon

Bitcoin’s price is surging. What happens next?

The cryptocurrency is up by 63% this year

Illustration: Satoshi Kambayashi
|Washington, DC

For a brief moment, everyone who owned bitcoin had made money from it. On March 5th the crypto token rose to an all-time high of just above $69,000—a level sure to delight the meme-loving crypto-crowd—before slipping back a little. The record capped a remarkable comeback from the dark days of November 2022, when interest-rate rises were crushing risk appetite and ftx, a crypto exchange, had just gone bust. Buying bitcoin on such exchanges seemed like little more than a fun and novel way to get robbed.

Explore more

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Back to the moon”

From the March 9th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

More from Finance & economics

China meets its official growth target. Not everyone is convinced

For one thing, 2024 saw the second-weakest rise in nominal GDP since the 1970s

Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed speaks during the launch of the Ethiopian Securities Exchange in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on January 10th 2025

Ethiopia gets a stockmarket. Now it just needs some firms to list

The country is no longer the most populous without a bourse


Shibuya crossing in Tokyo, Japan

Are big cities overrated?

New economic research suggests so


Why catastrophe bonds are failing to cover disaster damage 

The innovative form of insurance is reaching its limits

“The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson

It is a finite, sequential, incomplete information game

Will Donald Trump unleash Wall Street?

Bankers have plenty of reason to be hopeful