Key highlights:
- Bitcoin has reached new peaks, and it attracted crypto enthusiasts alongside new supporters.
- Actress Lindsay Lohan published a paid video promoting Bitcoin and Ethereum
As it makes new all-time highs, Bitcoin is now in the focus of the public’s attention once again. Astronomical price predictions are popping up left and right and even some celebrities are now publicly talking about cryptocurrency.
Lindsay Lohan has made a video recently and uploaded it on Cameo, a site where users can pay celebrities to record videos. In the video, Lohan said that Bitcoin and Ethereum could increase to $100,000 and $10,000, respectively. These kinds of celebrity promotions are similar to what we saw in 2017, where many celebrities promoted ICOs.
Many celebrities supported ICOs in 2017
Many crypto enthusiasts remember 2017. It was an adventurous year, and it seemed like every entrepreneur on the planet was coming out with a new ICO (initial coin offering). It was difficult to distinguish between legitimate projects and those who were just after a quick cash grab at the expense of their investors. In order to attract more investors, many projects paid celebrities to promote their projects.
Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled are two celebrities that promoted the Centra ICO in 2017. Later, SEC accused Centra of fraud and faking partnerships with larger companies. Many investors lost their money in these projects, and now the investors are pursuing the mentioned celebrities via a lawsuit.
Lionel Messi was another superstar that promoted SRN, a project that raised capital for a particular Blockchain smartphone. Luis Suarez was another soccer player who announced a project named Stox. The project raised $33.3 million money in its ICO. Other celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and others supported different projects in 2017, and it seems that we see a similar event in 2021.
Bitcoin is now trading above the peak of 2017
Bitcoin reached a new all-time high last week, and after that, it returned to around 35k. Bitcoin price is higher than the peak of 2017 right now. Ethereum, the biggest Altcoin, climbed above $1,000, a price level that was untouched since February 2018.
After reaching last week’s peak, BTC’s market cap increased to $700 billion, making Bitcoin more valuable than many major companies including Facebook. The main difference between the bull runs of 2017 and 2020 is that the previous bull-run was primarily driven by retail investors, while there’s a much greater number of institutional investors in the market now.
The published video shows that retail investors are returning to space. Retail investors, alongside institutional investors, could produce a colossal bull run that eclipses previous cryptocurrency market rallies.
The increased demand from retail investors is already being felt by cryptocurrency exchanges. Coinbase, one of the biggest crypto exchanges around the globe, experienced technical issues last week as its platform couldn’t keep up with the massive flood of users who were trying to trade cryptocurrency.
