Since the beginning of 2019 Bitcoin has been on a tear. BTC's price soared almost 20% in just one day to reach $5,000 on April 2nd and has drifted steadily upward towards the $6,000 price mark. Although, many of you might be curious to why is this happening.

Fidelity’ Entry To The Crypto Market

Fidelity, one of the worlds greatest funding corporations with nearly $7 billion customer sources, will reportedly birth a cryptocurrency buying and selling platform “within weeks.” Many analysts of the opinions that this is the best news for crypto prices this year, for two major reasons.

Firstly, the firm’s reputation on Wall Street lends bitcoin a huge nod of trust and confidence. Institutional traders have been notoriously wary of bitcoin thanks to a decade of negative preconceptions. Just this week, bitcoin has been slammed as “gambling device” by famed investor Warren Buffett. What it tells the broader street is that someone with decades of relationships and trust on Wall Street, Fidelity is kind of throwing its weight behind this and saying ‘hey, we can work with it, you can work with it too.’

Secondly, bitcoin trading has previously been dominated by retail investors. Big names like E-Trade that recently embraced crypto, but said they were focused on retail. Fidelity will shift the spectrum to “big money” institutions.

Bitcoin Fundamentals Are Looking Strong

For some reason or another, the Bitcoin blockchain has recently begun to see a monumental uptick in usage. The hash rate of the network has been surging at a fast pace since dropping down in mid-December. While seeing a continuous rise, it is also close to reaching its all-time high. In 2019, the hash rate is up 38 percent while the price has surged over 50% in 2019 and only 6 percent from its all-time high hash rate. However, yesterday it dropped down to 48.9 TH/s.

The average number of daily transactions involving BTC is nearing its all-time highs of around 400,000, which were last seen at the peak of the 2017 bubble. On May 1st, the network also saw record daily transactions at 439,378 transactions in a day. Before this, on April 11, we saw the Bitcoin network hitting 402,645. Back in December 2017, we saw the highest record at 490,459.

Despite the influx of use, transaction fees have remained low. Per stats compiled by Armin, last time Bitcoin was seeing this much use, fees were nearing 500 to 700 satoshis per byte. Now, that same statistic sits at a mere 15 to 30 satoshis per byte — over 95% lower than what was seen just over 15 months ago.