With Bitcoin, all of us might have got used to significant jumps upwards or downwards out of the blue, without any warning. Despite many people trying to predict the movements of the price of the leading cryptocurrency (and of all the other cryptocurrencies), few expected such massive growth last Friday. What was behind this surge?

Regardless of any technical analysis or charts, let us now look at the possible reasons why Bitcoin made it from the USD 7,300 region to as high as over USD 10,300 in less than 24 hours. There may be many reasons but the following three could be the most probable ones.

The first reason is China. Everyone knows that, if any country has an influence on the price of Bitcoin by its statements, then it’s undoubtedly this Asian superpower. And on Friday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that his aim was to make China a blockchain power. He praised blockchain and underlined his future support of it by saying this technology should be taught at universities. He also urged to increase the volume of investments into this sector. Although Xi Jinping was talking only about blockchain technology, these statements could definitely make Bitcoin’s price fire up.

As is usually the case with cryptocurrencies, there are several reasons behind such pump. The second one that might have pushed up the price by over 40% in 24 hours are the whales (people and corporations holding at least 5,000 BTC). The crypto sector is still very small and, consequently, it can be manipulated easily. The whales know this all too well. With their purchases or sales, they can push the price whenever they feel like. And they may have done it last week as well. 

The last and, probably, least realistic possibility, may be the fulfilment of a “mythical prediction” issued on 21 January this year by an unknown author who predicted the prices for the coming months and emphasized that the bottom was on 15 December 2018. His prediction for April and July was absolutely right. After the last significant movement, it appears that his prediction for October might also come true. He predicted that the price of one Bitcoin would be USD 16,000 in October. Although this seemed unrealistic early last week, Friday convinced us that anything can happen in the crypto world. What is interesting in this prediction is that Edward Snowden tweeted the image of it right on the day of the huge pump. Is it a chance or does this whistle blower know something we don’t?

Of course, there may be more reasons behind the growth. Probably, we’ll never know which one was it, so nothing else remains but to hope that there will be many more such surges in the future (unless, of course, you are shorting).