According to data from CryptoCompare, around 17:45 UTC (or 13:45 EST) on Wednesday (April 29), Bitcoin’s price managed to go above the $8,900 level for the first time since March 7. 

As you can see from the 24-hour BTC-USD price chart shown below, in today’s highly impressive rally, the Bitcoin price surged around 15%:

BTC-USD 24 Hour Chart on 29 Apr 2020.png

So, what’s behind today’s rally?

On April 23, when Bitcoin was trading around the $8,400 level, macro-economist and crypto analyst/trader Alex Krüger sent out this excellent tweet that beautifully summarized the reasons why he was feeling very bullish about Bitcoin in the short to medium term:

Also, as more and more people in the crypto have noticed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bitcoin has been showing a moderately high correlation with the S&P 500, meaning that the Bitcoin price has tended to go up on those days when the S&P 500 has gone up and down on those days where the S&P 500 has been in negative territory.

Today, about one hour before the U.S. stock market opened, American biotech company Gilead Sciences (aka “Gilead”) issued a press release in which it announced topline results from the open-label phase 3 trial of its antiviral antiviral drug “remdesivir” in hospitalized patients with Severe COVID-19. Preliminary results from this drug trial show that “at least 50% of patients treated with a five-day dosage of remdesivir improved and more than half were discharged from the hospital within two weeks.”

Gilead also issued a separate press release that said it was “aware of positive data emerging from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) study of the investigational antiviral remdesivir for the treatment of COVID-19.”

Then, roughly four hours later, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, while speaking from the White House, revealed that NIAID’s randomized, double-blind trial of remdesivir had shown that “the median time of recovery for patients taking the drug was 11 days, compared with 15 days in the placebo group.”

The good news about remdesivir seems to have helped the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq to surge 2.36%, 2.71%, and 3.46%. 

So, if we take all the positives for the Bitcoin market mentioned in Krüger’s analysis and add to it the good news about the trials of COVID-19 drug remdesivir, the readiness for virtually unlimited quantitative easing (QE) — i.e. money printing — from the world’s major central banks, especially the Federal Reserve, and the planned gradual re-opening of the U.S. economy (helped by a big improvement in testing for the coronavirus), we end up with a reasonable explanation for today’s explosive rally in the Bitcoin market.

Featured Image by “SnapLaunch” via Pixabay.com