Bitcoin touches $5,000, surges 20% in 2 days; other cryptocurrencies follow

After over four months of rangebound trade, bitcoin has finally broken out and has gained over 20 percent in the last couple of days. On April 2, the oldest cryptocurrency surged over 13 percent, according to the data on CoinMarketCap. This marks one of the biggest one-day gain since April last year.

The cryptocurrency, at some exchanges, also touched $5,000. On the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, bitcoin rose as much as 20 percent in Asian trading to briefly touch the $5,000 mark before settling at $4,730 by 0700 GMT, Reuters reported.

At the time of writing this article, bitcoin was trading at $4,675.54, according to CoinMarketCap. This market cap of bitcoin has got fatter by about $10 billion in the last two days, at $82 billion.

During the rally, the cryptocurrency also jumped over the 200-day simple moving average on the daily chart.

The gain was not restricted to bitcoin. Other cryptocurrencies have also surged during the day. Ethereum and XRP (Ripple) were up 5 percent each, EOS was up over 8 percent, and Litecoin surged over 10 percent.

In fact, out of top 100 cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinMarketCap, just six of them were trading in the red. Rest all currencies were trading higher for the day.

It was not immediately clear what propelled the rally in virtual currency prices.