Bitcoin (BTC-USD) prices surpassed $45,000 in the early morning hours of Tuesday. This marks the first time the cryptocurrency has stood above this benchmark since April 2022.

Yahoo Finance Crypto Reporter David Hollerith examines bitcoin's performance on the first trading day of 2024 and the investor optimism on pending Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approval of a spot bitcoin ETF.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

JARED BLIKRE: That's right, Seana, 46,000.

Let's go to the Y-Fi Interactive because you're going to see a notable difference from the screen just as it was a few minutes ago.

And there.

There's all that green.

And you put it over the last three days because we are in the midst of a multi-day rally, you can really see some of the outperformers here.

For what it's worth HEX's up 84% over this time, Solana up 10.8%, even Shiba Inu up 10%.

And you take a look at some of the crypto stocks here, let me go to a market cap view.

So the bigger ones that have Bitcoin exposure pretty much down here, but here's MSTR strategy, that's up about 4.2%.

And we'll get a two-day chart there, you can see quite a big pop on the open.

I was looking at some of the pre-market movers here, and this is over the last three days.

If you take a look at the last-- at only one day, a lot of these losses that we were seeing over that period have been clawed back here.

Let me just go back to Bitcoin and chart the price action over the last year because this latest breakout is par for the course.

We have seen just a series of higher lows and higher highs here.

We've seen a number of consolidations, a lot of flags here, and they have all resolved to the upside.

So this is the definition.

This is a textbook stair stepping trend higher, not only over the short term, but over the long term as this has been in place for several months now.

I want to show you Bitcoin seasonality.

I was able to generate this.

And Bitcoin, this goes all the way back to 2011, so it's basically the average of the returns every day of the year.

And when I say that, it's every day of the year it trades.

So that makes it a little bit easier.

But you can see it's a really choppy here.

We tend to take a little bit of a tumble in May, June, early summer, then find our footing in July with another upswing in October.

We'll have to see how it plays out this year, but seasonality worked so well last year with stocks, so worth paying attention to.