Bitcoin prices surged 4% Friday to above $18,700 — inching closer to the all-time excessive of slightly below $20,000 from December 2017 — after BlackRock (BLK)‘s chief funding officer of fastened earnings, Rick Rieder, mentioned in a CNBC interview that bitcoin is right here to remain.
“Do I believe it is a sturdy mechanism that might take the place of gold to a big extent? Yeah, I do, as a result of it is a lot extra purposeful than passing a bar of gold round,” Rieder mentioned.
The endorsement from BlackRock, which manages nearly $8 trillion in assets, is the most recent signal of validation of bitcoin from the mainstream monetary world.
Sq. (SQ) and PayPal (PYPL) have endorsed it as a viable form of payment, and influential hedge fund managers Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones have touted it as a funding.
Nonetheless, gold moved increased on Friday, too. Gold and bitcoin have benefited from a weaker dollar. Buyers more and more view bitcoin as a viable various to paper, government-backed currencies.
