Investing.com - The price of Bitcoin rose suddenly on Wednesday, as other cryptocurrencies were also higher.
Bitcoin rose 3.82% to $6,678.90 on the Bitfinex exchange, as of 8:53 AM ET (12:53 GMT), after spiking 5% to $6,858.61 in five minutes of early trading in Asia. It was the first time the digital currency was above $6,800 since Aug. 7.
The reason for the sudden spike was not immediately clear, but some have cited a security attack on cryptocurrency trading platform BitMEX. The DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, forced the service offline, after the company was set to undergo scheduled maintenance.
Still, bitcoin has struggled to gain ground so far this year, falling nearly 66% since its peak of almost $20,000 in December.
Cryptocurrencies overall were higher. The coin market cap of total market capitalization was at $217 billion at the time of writing, compared with $210 billion on Tuesday.
Ethereum, the second-biggest alternative currency by market cap, rose 1.36% to $284.88, while Ripple, the third-largest virtual currency, increased 2.37% to $0.34102 and Litecoin was at $57.99, up 3.92%.
In other news, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), is involved in a crypto investment group, Equi Capital. The computer engineer praised Bitcoin in an interview at the Chainxchange blockchain convention.
“It’s so independent!” he said. “It’s kind of like the internet when it was brand new … I was amazed at the technology behind it."
"Mathematics to me is like nature,” Wozniak continued. “It’s much better than human beings … I trust those things of nature more than what man makes up. Man makes up currencies, controls them, issues new U.S. dollars every year; Bitcoin was immune to that.”