Bitcoin nears $60,000 again on renewed institutional backing from PayPal, Visa, CME

Bitcoin nears $60,000 again on renewed institutional backing from PayPal, Visa, CME

R.Tsubin/Getty Images

Bitcoin on Wednesday flirted with the $60,000 level anew in an attempt to breach its all-time high set in March. Wider adoption of the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has renewed the interest in bitcoin this week.

On Wednesday, the price of bitcoin rallied to an intraday high of $59,738 early morning Eastern before dropping back to the $57,000-level. The cryptocurrency is trading higher by 0.98% to $59,413 as of 2:53 pm Eastern.

"The bitcoin rally may be partly fueled by institutional involvement with recent announcements from Visa and PayPal inspiring new all-time highs last night," Paolo Ardoino, CTO of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, told Insider. "Payments as a use case are becoming more and more tangible to fintech companies and their customers, which might mean curiosity from retail investors.

On Tuesday, PayPal said its US customers can use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay at millions of its online merchants globally. This means that customers can convert bitcoin and ether, among others, to fiat currencies at checkouts to make purchases.

CME Group, the world's largest derivatives marketplace, also on Tuesday revealed that it is expanding its suite of crypto offerings with micro bitcoin futures. These will be one-tenth the size of one bitcoin,