“Every single day, the concept that it could be worth something, it could be a store of value is being continually approved by more large, powerful entities,” Johnson says, pointing to established financial institutions holding digital currencies and large corporations adding them to their corporate balance sheets. “The idea that it’s actually worth something is continuing to grow as adoption and acceptance continues to grow as well.”
Pips are the units used to measure movement in the price of a cryptocurrency, and refer to a one-digit movement in the price at a specific level. Generally, valuable cryptocurrencies are traded at the ‘dollar´ level, so a move from a price of $190.00 to $191.00, for example, would mean that the cryptocurrency has moved a single pip. However, some lower-value cryptocurrencies are traded at different scales, where a pip can be a cent or even a fraction of a cent.

Another institutional hit for bitcoin–which probably had the most sustained effect–was the SEC’s refusal to approve a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). This would be a path for more mainstream people in finance to dabble with blockchain; it would allow investors to dip their toes in bitcoin without owning the actual asset. Not only that, but it would make bitcoin available on the most prominent financial markets. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), however, has yet to allow such a fund to exist–mostly because it is unable to monitor crypto-transactions in order to avoid market manipulation.
These protocols also mask the identities of cryptocurrency users, making transactions and fund flows difficult to attribute to specific individuals or groups.