Dubai: Bitcoin finally hit the $10,000 (Dh36,730) mark on Tuesday, but — and this is critical — it has crossed the mark on only one out of an estimated 48 exchanges so far.

On Tuesday evening, Bitcoin was trading at $10,135 on CEX, a London-based exchange. However, most of exchanges still had the digital currency trading below $10,000.

CoinDesk, for instance, showed BTC hitting a high of $9.929.61. Coinbase show it trading at $9,952.16.

As there is no uniformity regarding Bitcoin trading, prices typically differ from exchange to exchange.

Bitcoin prices globally had been struggling to breach the $10,000 level over the last three straight sessions, causing analysts to argue whether the digital currency is in a bubble.

Bitcoin prices have gained $1,000 in the past three days, but the cryptocurrency has stalled just below the $10,000 mark.

Bitcoin prices hit a high of $9,929.61 on Tuesday, before trading 1.73 per cent higher at $9,907.38.

The cryptocurrency has witnessed a more than 900 per cent rally in the year so far, from nearly $1,000 in January.

“Mathematically, Bitcoin is in a massive bubble right now, but I don’t know when it is going to burst,” Steen Jakobsen, chief investment officer at Saxo Bank, told Gulf News.

“We know mathematically what a bubble looks like, and the Bitcoin chart is in a bubble.”

Bitcoin’s price has been helped in recent months by the announcement that the world’s biggest derivatives exchange operator CME Group would start offering Bitcoin futures.

However, according to technical analysts, charts suggest that Bitcoin may face psychological barrier at $10,000, but if breached it may go one way towards $13,000.

“Traders are looking to buy on dips. The rally is driven by traders who don’t want to miss out. The prices will move one way until the buying momentum sustains,” said an analyst who did not wish to be named.

Because of rallying Bitcoin prices, other smaller cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin and Ripple have also witnessed a boost along with initial coin offerings.

Ethereum last traded at $475, after rising more than 100 per cent over the past week.

‘Massive interest’

“The only question earlier that I got earlier was on gold. The only question that I get now is on cryptocurrencies. There has been massive interest, and we have seen stunning numbers in terms of growth,” Jakobsen said, adding “the demand is so bad that we now have a 24-year old crypto-analyst.”

Volumes for Saxo Bank’s exchange traded note on the cryptocurrencies have been growing by 50 per cent — mostly driven by private money, not institutional.

“Most of the younger generation are on board. It’s top heavy with people under 30 years of age, and that accounts for 50 per cent. Most of the investors are in the testing phase,” Jakobsen said.

Saxo Bank said Bitcoin would “take-off” in its outrageous prediction last year.

UBS, which manages more than $2 trillion of clients assets, said their ultra-high-net worth clients are interested in Bitcoin but are not investing into the cryptocurrency as the Swiss Bank does not see it as a store of value like gold.

“It doesn’t really yet have characteristics of it as a store of value. For investors, you enter into an investment, you should have a sense of the conditions of when you would to exit. In Bitcoin, there is no way to know. You may end up staring at a chart, but there is no fundamental value,” Mark Haefele, global chief investment officer at UBS, told Gulf News.