Investing.com - Bitcoin was eyeing $11,000 on Tuesday amid news that payment platform Circle was buying cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex.
Bitcoin was trading at $10,651, up 10.22% as of 7:48 AM ET (12:48 GMT) on the Bitfinex exchange after hitting an overnight low of $10,140.
Circle, which is backed by Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), announced on Monday that it was buying Poloniex for $400 million. The peer-to-peer payments platform has forayed into Bitcoin before, and its mobile app Circle Pay runs on blockchain technology.
Cryptocurrencies were also bolstered by news that South Korean officials seemed unsure on how to regulate the cryptocurrency market. Hong Nam-ki, minister of office for government policy coordination, told parliament on Tuesday that “the government hasn't made any conclusion yet,” regarding virtual currencies.
South Korea has become a hub for virtual currency trading and the government has given mixed signals about how it will regulate cryptocurrencies. Last week the government said it would normalize digital currency trading, which was welcome news to investors who feared an outright ban.
Meanwhile asset manager BlackRock warned investors to only put their money in cryptocurrencies if they are willing to lose everything.
"We don't see them becoming part of mainstream investment portfolios soon," BlackRock’s global Chief Investment Strategist Richard Turnill said in a weekly note on Monday.
He added that BlackRock was warming up to the potential of the underlying blockchain technology used in cryptocurrencies.
Other virtual currencies were trading higher, with rival Ethereum, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rising 2.81% to $881.12 on the Bitfinex exchange. The third largest cryptocurrency, Ripple, was up 3.64%% to trade at $0.9386 and Litecoin was last at $218.11, a fall of 3.87%.