CoinCorner, one of the UK’s leading Bitcoin exchanges, has seen a growing number of people entering the Bitcoin market in the run up to the halving in May.

A halving (sometimes also called “halvening”) is an event where the Bitcoin mining reward is halved, meaning miners receive half the amount of Bitcoins for verifying transactions. This is the third halving event to happen in Bitcoin’s history, with the reward due to reduce from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC per block. Halvings are scheduled to happen roughly every four years or every 210,000 blocks, until the total number of Bitcoins (21 million) have been mined.

CoinCorner is reporting month-over-month growth in the number of people signing up for an account at coincorner.com and buying Bitcoin since the start of the 2020.

CoinCorner co-founder and CEO, Danny Scott, says that previous halving trends were an indicator that this was to be expected:

“As the third halving event to occur, there are expectations for what might come after, with history telling us that the Bitcoin price will typically begin to rise significantly within the 12 months following a halving - something that can be simply put down to supply and demand.

“Our data shows an increase in the number of new customers every month since the beginning of 2020. February was up 5% compared to January and March was up 17.6% compared to February. We expect to see this trend continue, not just for the next month, but for the next year.

“The current unexpected global crisis and a number of notable events in Bitcoin’s pipeline over the next 9 months is causing speculation throughout the industry that another “bull run” is on the horizon and I believe that we can only expect the price of Bitcoin to continue in the direction that everything is currently pointing potentially towards that $20,000 figure and beyond.”