Bitcoin is up 50% so far in 2023, beating major commodities and stock indexes. Industry insiders said the bank collapses have sent investors looking for alternatives to the traditional banking system and there is also anticipation of a slowdown in interest rate rises, which is helping bitcoin.
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Bitcoin is up 50% this year despite the collapse of major crypto-focused banks, beating major stock indexes and commodities.
On Jan. 1, bitcoin began trading at just over $16,500. On Wednesday, it was hovering around the $25,000 mark, thanks to a rally that began on Sunday.
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The surge in price this year comes after bitcoin crashed 65% in 2022 after a number of major collapses of projects and hedge funds, bankruptcies, liquidity issues and the failure of FTX, one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges.
The recent rise has come as somewhat of a surprise, given the closure of Silvergate Capital and Signature Bank, two of the biggest lenders to the crypto industry. And Silicon Valley Bank, viewed as the backbone of the technology startup industry, also failed.
“Bitcoin’s 50% surge in 2023 is a reflection of how beaten down it was post the FTX collapse, the changing interest rate outlook and the failure (& resurrection) of SVB,” Antoni Trenchev, co-founder of crypto trading platform Nexo, told CNBC.
From its peak of nearly $69,000 in November 2021, bitcoin is still down more than 60%.
Here are some of the main reasons bitcoin is up.
Bank collapses
While the collapse of Silvergate, Signature Bank and SVB sent shockwaves through financial markets, bitcoin’s rebound could also be fueled by those very failures, according to Vijay Ayyar, vice president of corporate development and international at crypto exchange Luno.
“This past week’s events around the failure of SVB and other banks have also shone a spotlight on the power of decentralised currencies that people can fully custody and own,” Ayyar said. “Decentralised finance is beginning to hit home in terms of a concept to many more people now.”
Bitcoin is called a decentralized currency because it isn’t issued by a single entity like a central bank. Instead, it relies on an underlying technology called blockchain and its network is maintained by a community.
Nexo’s Trenchev said the intervention “reminded investors about the structural deficiencies of the U.S. banking system and the U.S. dollar underpinning it, reasons why we’ve seen a flight to Bitcoin this week.”
Bitcoin proponents have claimed the digital currency is a way for investors to protect themselves against central bank moves, particularly quantitative easing and looser monetary policy, which they say erodes the value of fiat currency. Proponents point to bitcoin’s finite supply as a key feature of it being a store of value.
Interest rate outlook
The bank collapses came after a year of interest rate hikes from the U.S. Federal Reserve. SVB’s issue was that it had to sell off assets, mainly Treasurys, to shore up its balance sheet as depositors withdrew funds. But it sold those assets at a hefty loss because interest rate rises had pushed the price of Treasurys lower.
“In the space of a few days we’d turned from a hawkish Powell to an environment where economists were predicting the Fed might not even hike rates in March, benefiting Bitcoin,” Trenchev said.
“It’s been said that the Fed will only stop hiking rates when they break something, and now that something is broken, attention has turned to Bitcoin.”
Bitcoin vs. stocks
Bitcoin has rallied 50% this year. In contrast, the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which bitcoin has been closely correlated to in the past, is up 12% in the year to date. The S&P 500 is up 2.5%.
Gold, which is seen as an asset that investors flock to in times of market turmoil, is up just over 3% this year.
There aren’t many commodities or stock indexes that have beaten bitcoin. In terms of individual stocks, Meta is up around 60% in the year to date.
Among the major digital currencies, ether has rallied 42% this year, while solana is up more than 100%.
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
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Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.