Bitcoin Rides $46K-$48K

During the weekend, bitcoin’s price ranged between $46,000 and $48,000. The crypto witching day ended Friday with the expiration of approximately $8.67 billion in bitcoin and ether options contracts.

Bitcoin, the oldest cryptocurrency, experienced a slight price recovery to around $47,961.0 on Saturday before falling back into the red on Sunday. However, its overall spot trading volume across major centralized exchanges fell over the weekend. According to Blofin, a Cayman Islands-based crypto financial services firm, approximately 115,000 bitcoin options and about 882,000 ether options contracts with a total notional value of $8.67 billion expired on Friday. Following the completion of the settlement, bitcoin’s price briefly surged to above $48,000 on some exchanges, according to AICoin, a crypto trading data platform, on December 31.

Meanwhile, at the time of writing, harmony (ONE) and Chainlink (LINK) were the biggest winners among alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins). Harmony is the native token of the Harmony intelligent contract platform. LINK is an ERC-20 token for the Chainlink decentralized oracle network.

Ethereum

Rounding out the last decade, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revisited his predictions from the previous decade. He demonstrated a penchant for being correct about abstract ideas rather than ongoing software development issues.

Buterin began the Twitter thread by referring to his July 23, 2013 article. He highlighted two of Bitcoin’s (BTC) key benefits: internationality and censorship resistance. Buterin saw Bitcoin as having the potential to protect citizens’ purchasing power in Iran, Argentina, China, and Africa.

Buterin did notice an increase in stablecoin adoption when he saw Argentinian businesses using Tether (USDT). He backed up his ten-year-old theories about the adverse effects of Bitcoin regulation. Buterin shared his vision for a “plausible roadmap” for ETH 2.0 in early December, proposing “a second tier of staking, with low resource requirements” for distributed block validation.