Bitcoin in all-out romp

In a year-end run-up reminiscent of 2017 and 2021, Bitcoin earlier today struck $44,000. It’s the latest milestone in a six-day surge during which time the largest crypto advanced by as much as 16%.

As of 7:17 a.m. (EST), BTC was $44,047, per CoinGecko. BTC had popped 5.4% in the past day as of that time.

The FTX-collapse-inspired crypto rout that defined the final few weeks of 2022 – and launched a thousand obituaries – is fading further into the rear-view mirror.

Still, critics in various corners of the financial and media realms continue to scoff at this latest rally as yet another head fake that won’t end well.

As of now, though, the market is that giddy kid on Christmas, rifling through a stocking stuffed with catalysts, from rosy interest rate forecasts to a coming halving event and the potential for spot ETFs getting a regulatory blessing, triggering a deluge of money coming into the market.

For most of the past 49 weeks, BTC has been climbing steadily. More than a few outbursts were eventually followed by frustrating retracements. A trading band between $25K and $30K dominated spring and summer.

Coinbase at one stage, only hours ago, reportedly stamped BTC at $45K.

The $40K mark, which only came into view this past Sunday, hadn’t been hit since early 2022. It felt huge. For an hour or so. Then $40K was left in the dust, as was $42K.

BTC has gained 160% in the past year. Roughly half of that return has come since September.

"FOMO, mixed with a dose of YOLO, seems to be back," said Nick Baker, deputy editor of CoinDesk.

Among Big Ten assets, Dogecoin is having its own private party. Overnight, DOGE lit up like an 80-foot-tall Norway Spruce crammed into Rockefeller Center. Today marks the OG memecoin's 10th birthday. DOGE's 24-hour journey from $0.09 to $0.10 in time for the anniversary sure seems like an orchestrated pump. But is there something more to this, maybe tying into Elon Musk?

DOGE gained as much as 16% since early Tuesday. The last time DOGE hit a dime was one year ago on its 9th birthday.

Musk, an unabashed DOGE champion, is trying to raise $1 billion for his AI aspirations, according to a filing. When this news broke, DOGE took off.

"One of the strangest correlations in markets persists," CoinDesk's Baker added.

BitTorrent as of Wednesday morning was going haywire. CoinGecko showed the Tron-affiliated, decentralized file-sharing protocol's native BTT had soared by 100% in the past 24 hours. But just in the one-hour period between 7 a.m. (EST) and 8 a.m. (EST), BTT fell 10%.

BTT's parabolic rise comes as the Tron network's total user base approached a major milestone of 200 million accounts.

Meanwhile, a few other outsized gainers on the week, including LUNC and ORDI, are shading incongruously red over the past day. The latter, ORDI, has gained 130% since the last day of November. ORDI fell 5.5% in the past 24 hours.

A fiery debate has accompanied the explosion of the Ordinals protocol for putting NFT-like artifacts on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Purists do not want the network used for anything except financial transactions; and they view inscriptions of images and/or text added to satoshis so as to create digital artifacts as purely congestion-causing clutter. Others see the network as large and versatile enough to host a range of use cases, as Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor insists.

One Bitcoin network developer, Luke Dashjr, currently dismisses Ordinals as nothing more than a byproduct of a bug, one that easily could be patched.

"Inscriptions are exploiting a vulnerability in Bitcoin Core to spam the blockchain," Dashjr explained in a recent X thread. "I can only hope it will finally get fixed."