- Bitcoin has climbed over 4% since Monday.
- It's held steady this week despite investor fears that FTX's implosion would trigger a sell-off.
Bitcoin is on course to end the week trading higher despite the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange FTX.
The largest digital asset by market capitalization has climbed 4.47% since Monday's opening bell to trade at just over $16,800 at last check.
Those gains come, in spite of ongoing revelations about FTX, which filed for bankruptcy last week after suffering a major solvency crisis.
In a Chapter 11 filing published Thursday, new FTX CEO John Ray III slammed the group's corporate governance as worse than Enron and said it had only $659,000 worth of crypto holdings.
But after crashing 23% last week, bitcoin has bounced back to outperform both the S&P 500 (down 0.25%) and the Nasdaq (up 0.28%) as of Thursday's close.
Bulls say that FTX's sudden collapse could be bullish for bitcoin's price because it's seen as a decentralized asset that doesn't rely on intermediary companies like Bankman-Fried's exchange.
"It means you don't have to trust the FTXs of the world," MicroStrategy chairman Michael Saylor told Fox Business' 'Making Money with Charles Payne' on Tuesday. "So yeah, I am a big believer because I believe that although crypto in this case may have been the problem, bitcoin is still the solution."
Bankman-Fried "may have made a million bitcoin maximalists with this crash," he added.
Others argue that the token has benefitted from a lower-than-expected October inflation print, which may give the Federal Reserve scope to pivot away from the outsized interest rate hikes it's implemented at its last four meetings.
"Of course there's a hangover from the problems with FTX," CoinShares' head of research, James Butterfill told Insider in a recent interview. "But I think there's a lot of potential positive forces around a softer Fed now, with some even expecting just a 25-basis-point rate hike in December."
The Fed's aggressive interest rate hikes have crushed cryptocurrencies and other risk assets this year, with central bank tightening making borrowing more expensive and restricting investors' cash flows.
Bitcoin has plummeted 64% year-to-date and 76% from the all-time high of just under $69,000 it reached in November 2021.