Bitcoin’s “halving” is expected to happen soon. The halving, which happens roughly every four years, was written into Bitcoin’s code at its inception as a way to reduce the rate at which Bitcoins are created. In short, it’s a change to the cryptocurrency’s underlying technology designed to cut the rate at which new Bitcoins are created.
According to CoinGecko’s countdown clock, the halving is scheduled to happen in the early hours of Saturday GMT.
For some crypto fans, the halving will underscore Bitcoin’s value as an increasingly scarce commodity — capped at 21 million tokens — while skeptics see it as little more than a technical change talked up by speculators to inflate the virtual currency’s price.
The halving works by halving the rewards cryptocurrency miners receive for creating new tokens, make it more expensive for them to put new Bitcoins into circulation.
The event follows a surge in Bitcoin’s price to an all-time high of $73,803.25 in March, having spent much of 2023 slowly recovering from 2022’s dramatic plunge.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been supported by the excitement around the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision to approve spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in January, as well as expectations that central banks will cut interest rates soon.
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