Bitcoin rises above $71,000 reaching record high

Bitcoin hit a record high on Monday, rising above $71,000, as the surge in the biggest cryptocurrency showed no signs of slowing down.

Bitcoin rose by as much as 4.8% to a record $71,677 in European trading, bringing gains for the year so far to 70%.

The world's most valuable cryptocurrency has been boosted by a flood of cash into new spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds as well as hopes that the Federal Reserve will soon cut interest rates.

Supply of bitcoin, which is limited to 21 million tokens, is going to get tighter in April, when the so-called halving event takes place.

Every four years, the rate at which new supply is released into circulation, as well as the reward for crypto miners, is halved, which tends to support the price.

Over the past several months, bitcoin’s rally has been turbocharged by US regulators’ approval of exchange-traded funds pegged to the digital asset, which created an on-ramp for more traditional investors to incorporate bitcoin into their portfolios.

That approval took years of lobbying by crypto firms, and was granted only grudgingly by the Securities and Exchange Commission after a court ruled the regulator’s reasons for rejecting bitcoin ETF applications were “arbitrary and capricious.”