Bitcoin climbs back above $16,000, rallying more than 50% from Friday’s low

Anthony Wallace | AFP | Getty Images

A man looks at ATM machines (L and R) for digital currency Bitcoin in Hong Kong on December 18, 2017.

Bitcoin rallied Tuesday, recovering from a sharp sell-off late last week.

The digital currency briefly climbed more than 12.5 percent to above $16,100 late Tuesday morning and was trading near $15,700 early in the afternoon, according to Coinbase, the leading U.S. platform for trading major digital currencies.

Coinbase said on its status website at 1:24 p.m., ET, that “Due to high volume, we are experiencing a backlog of outgoing transactions for BTC and ETH. … Outgoing transactions of BTC and ETH may be delayed by several hours.”

With Tuesday’s gains, bitcoin has now recovered more than 50 percent from a low of $10,400 hit Friday in an extremely volatile day of trading that had no immediately apparent explanation behind it. Trading on Coinbase was also down for more than two hours during Friday’s sell-off.

The CME bitcoin futures expiring in January traded 10.75 percent higher Tuesday near $15,655, and the Cboe bitcoin futures gained 12.4 percent to $15,690 in early afternoon trading.

Ethereum traded 0.2 percent higher near near $767, down about 13 percent from its record high of $881.44 hit Thursday, according to CoinMarketCap.

The bitcoin offshoot, bitcoin cash, traded 0.8 percent lower near $2,825, according to Coinbase.