At press time, bitcoin is trading for $9,600. This is $100 higher than yesterday’s price, and roughly $500 more than where it stood at the beginning of the week. The currency was experiencing strong resistance between $9,000 and $9,300, but has since moved past its technical barricades and has passed the $,500 point.

$10,000 is likely right around the corner as the currency prepares for further bullish behavior. So far, the currency has risen nearly five percent since Monday, and adoption continues to grow in regions of Asia, thus boosting the currency’s popularity and power.

Hardware wallet company Tangem, for example, recently announced the pilot sale of its new “bitcoin banknotes” in the Singapore market. The company works to enable physical transactions via virtual currencies like bitcoin. Millions of notes will be produced before the end of the year, and will be worth anywhere between $0.01 and $0.05.

The company has produced 10,000 notes that have already been shipped to various “partners and distributors.” Tangem says the banknotes feature the highest financial security in today’s market.

One of the factors that may be pushing the price further is the growing desire and presence of bitcoin-related education. Ferdinando Ametrano – professor at Politecnico di Milano – has served as a program director for several bitcoin developer conferences. He explained that the growth in knowledge and resources has ultimately allowed figures like the famed Rockefellers to enter the crypto space and further legitimize the industry.

“Many educational and training efforts have lately helped to introduce new developers to Bitcoin Core and the bitcoin software ecosystem,” he says.

Jimmy Song is the founder of the

Programming Blockchain Workshop. He has delivered information regarding bitcoin and blockchain capacities to over 250 people since the workshop began in September 2017. As the primary lecturer, Song says that audiences continue to grow with each event, as the need for blockchain knowledge is at an all-time high.

“Growing the developer team, in numbers and in quality of contributions and everything else is important because you need diversity in your views,” he stated. “You don’t want it to just be a couple of people that do everything.”

Some of the biggest support this week came from financial analyst Matt Greenspan. An alleged bitcoin expert, Greenspan explains that the currency will “undoubtedly” surpass the $20,000 high it reached last December, and that the massive correction that took place in January is all part of a “normal retracement after an epic high.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future,” he commented. “But I believe that more than fear of regulation, the decline from the $20,000 peak was more of just a normal retracement. Whenever the price moves and jumps into a new order of magnitude, we need to see some sort of retracement on that. It’s the same thing when it jumped up from eight cents to $3.50. it then had a retracement back to a dollar. That’s a very normal thing after that kind of leap, so if we look at it now, I believe we are about five or six percent up over the price from a year ago.”