The stock of Riot Blockchain, a bitcoin mining company, has literally skyrocketed on the stock exchange.
The stock is listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol RIOT, and during the course of yesterday, the price rose from $54 to $61 in just a few hours, before falling back to around $59. However, it later rose further to nearly $64.
But this is even more remarkable if we extend the comparison to previous months.
Until mid-November 2020, the price was below $5, but then it began a massive rise, first to around $30 in January, and then to over $60 yesterday.
Looking at the last three months, it has made an incredible 1,500% gain, much higher than bitcoin itself.
It has to be said, however, that RIOT’s share price had already climbed to around $30 in the past, back in December 2017 when the last big speculative bubble in bitcoin’s price occurred.
Therefore, the $30 reached in January was nothing more than a return to all-time highs, something the bitcoin price actually did a month earlier.
The share price of Riot blockchain compared to BTC
Taking precisely $30 as a reference, RIOT’s current price has roughly doubled, while BTC’s price compared to its December 2017 peak has increased by two and a half times.
In other words, the trend of the RIOT stock follows that of BTC, albeit only in broad strokes and not with a precise correspondence.
Going even further back in time, however, it can be seen that the all-time high of the stock was reached in October 2007, when it reached $3,400.
However, it is worth noting that Riot Blockchain is actually the new name of the company that used to be called Bioptix, and has been listed on the Nasdaq since 2003 (Bitcoin was born in 2009). The performance of its stock on the stock exchange is clearly divided into two moments, before and after the change of name and business, but has always been rather volatile.
The name change took place in October 2017, and the addition of the term ‘blockchain’ was probably the reason for the stock’s boom at the end of that year, in the wake of the speculative bubble on bitcoin. Previously, when it was called Bioptix, the company was involved in biotech, but then turned to crypto investments and bitcoin mining.
