Crypto at a zenith

A sea of green on a red-letter day for crypto:

• Ethereum hit $2,150, a new all-time high. ETH got there early on Tuesday. As of 9 a.m. (EST), the second-largest coin was about $2,120.
• Once left for dead, XRP is over $1 for the first time since March of 2018.
• As of earlier today, the total crypto market cap reached $2 trillion, having doubled in the past two months. Half of that is in Bitcoin, which just in the past hour, as of 9 a.m., rose 0.2% to about $58,612.
• For several weeks, conventional wisdom held that the Indian government would ban crypto. In that time, India's WazirX’s in-house exchange token, WRX, gained 2,000%.
• No one was talking about peer-to-peer file transfer token BitTorrent mere months ago. BTT is up nearly 5,000% this year.

Following a wild week flouting the stratosphere and a madcap Monday in which for a time it soared 70%, BitTorrent (BTT) has fallen back to earth.

BTT, the token connected with the much-utilized peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, declined about 19% as of Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. (EST), trading at about $0.010 per coin, but with a market capitalization of nearly $7 billion, enough to keep it in CoinGecko's Top 20.

The past seven days, as of this morning, has seen BTT rally 170%. Since hitting a mathematically difficult to convey low last March, BTT has exploded by 7,000%.

Last month, Benzinga said, BTT rallied on buzz surrounding an impending token burn.

On Sunday, BitTorrent announced some development updates aimed at making the network more decentralized.

Decrypt said it remains unclear why BTT has lit up.

Coinpedia has pegged the 2022 price prediction for BTT at 10 cents, InvestorPlace said.

At some point, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust shareholders might have bristled at six-month lockups and a 2% management fee, especially considering there's now a Canadian-regulated ETF available at a fraction of the cost.

Grayscale released a communication Monday that said, essentially, hang tight, we've got you covered.

While the SEC ultimately will decide the timing, Grayscale stressed its intentions: to convert GBTC into a lower-cost Bitcoin ETF when permissible. And when the time comes, shareholders need not do anything, Grayscale said, noting that if all goes to plan the management fee would be reduced accordingly, automatically.

So now there could be a new form of arbitrage for traders buying GBTC and waiting for the regulatory approval to kick in, possibly capturing a discount that could be upwards of 30%.

GBTC, with assets of $38.8 billion, sprouted up fast in the past year with a sizable spurt last fall.

Analysts suspect that announcing the ETF conversion is a way to keep the fund liquid by making shareholders happy.