The price of the flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin has recently moved to a new all-time high near $72,000 after surging more than 70% year-to-date, in a rise that helped its total market capitalization surpass that of silver.
According to data from CompaniesMarketCap, first spotted by Casa CTO and co-founder Jameson Lopp, at the time Bitcoin surpass silver its total market capitalization was $.1389 trillion, surpassing silver’s $1.382 trillion. Bitcoin’s market capitalization has since grown to now stand at $1.413 trillion.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is around $250 billion away form surpassing the total market capitalization of tech giant Alphabet, the company behind the world’s largest search engine Google, as well as the world’s largest video-sharing platform YouTube.
The cryptocurrency’s total market capitalization is still far behind that of the world’s largest company by the metric, Microsoft, which currently has a total market capitalization of $3.018 trillion, and far behind gold as the precious metal’s total market capitalization is now $14.664 trillion.
Bitcoin’s price this rise rose partly over demand from the newly launched spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States, including offerings from some of the world’s largest asset managers BlackRock and Fidelity.
Its upcoming halving event, which will cut in half the coinbase reward miners receive for finding a block, is also expected to help the cryptocurrency’s price surge, as supply entering the market will be cut in half while institutional demand keeps on rising.
The surge has seen renowned investor Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager widely recognized in the financial world for his large-scale, high-profile, and sometimes controversial investments, consider investing in the cryptocurrency during a discussion with Michael Saylor, the co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy.
As CryptoGlobe reported, the a renewed surge in interest for Bitcoin options has been reflecting the bullish sentiment seen in the cryptocurrency space, with Deribit-listed Bitcoin call options with a strike price of $200,000 seeing a notional open interest of over $20 million.
Featured image via Unsplash.
