Many cryptocurrency experts and analysts were quick to suggest that bitcoin's rise in tandem with the fall in the yuan means it's becoming a safe haven asset, despite its extreme volatility and no one being able to accurately predict what bitcoin will do next.
However, it would appear the bitcoin price suddenly soared last night before China announced an increase to the yuan’s reference rate, with analysis of trade volume data by The Block, a bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry website, finding the catalyst was unusually high bitcoin volume on Binance, the world's largest bitcoin and crypto exchange.
Bitcoin, despite being the most widely-traded cryptocurrency with volumes into the billions of dollars every day, still struggles with wild price swings due to so-called market whales moving large volumes of bitcoin at above or below the current market value.
When this happens it can cause the market to suddenly and unexpected move in one direction, often to soon return to where it was trading previously.
Some closely-watched bitcoin and crypto analysts were unconvinced the rapid rise in the bitcoin price was solely due to the falling yuan.
"Some people have gone so far as to say that the rally we had in bitcoin is a direct result of the falling yuan," Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst at brokerage eToro, wrote in a note to clients.
"Due to the anonymous nature of bitcoin, it's extremely difficult to tell exactly where the demand is coming from. The supply factors, of course, have not changed by much."
Meanwhile, there are a number of other triggers that could have pushed the bitcoin price higher over the short term.
Over the weekend, litecoin, the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, halved its block reward for miners, reducing the number of litecoin tokens miners receive from 25 to 12.5.
These so-called halvening events have come to be seen as a positive for cryptocurrency prices as they put a squeeze on demand, with litecoin up some 300% over the first half of this year.
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