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The price of bitcoin passed another important milestone on Friday as the cryptocurrency’s market value exceeded $ 1 trillion, according to Coindesk.
The digital currency was trading at just under $ 54,000 per coin on Friday when it hit new levels and rose to a high of $ 54,880 later in the session, according to Coin Metrics. The price of bitcoin is now up about 350% in the past six months. Prior to the recent surge, the digital asset has never traded above USD 20,000.
The move was fueled in part by increased adoption of the cryptocurrency by major investors and companies. The oldest bank in the United States, the Bank of New York Mellon, announced it was withdrawing the space earlier this month. Elon Musk’s Tesla converted some of its balance money into bitcoin earlier this year and said it would start accepting the digital tokens as payment.
Bitcoin “has started to get so big that it arguably creates its own demand as companies and institutions begin to make forays into an area they wouldn’t have touched a few months earlier,” Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank research strategist, said in a note . “Ironically, it is turning itself into a credible asset class by increasing so much lately and also getting an increasing institutional buy-in.”
The market value is calculated by multiplying the price of bitcoin by the number created. While not a perfect equation, the $ 1 trillion market value would make bitcoin’s worth greater than all but a handful of stocks in the world. For example, Tesla has a market cap of about $ 700 billion, while Apple is estimated to be more than $ 2 trillion.
Pro-bitcoin investors and entrepreneurs celebrated the milestone on social media.
“From white paper to $ 1 trillion. #Bitcoin eat living gold, ” Gemini’s Cameron Winklevoss said on Twitter.
“RIP bears,” tweeted Morgan Creek Digital Assets co-founder Anthony Pompliano.
Certainly, not everyone on Wall Street is convinced of bitcoin’s future prospects. Citadel Securities founder Ken Griffin said on Friday that he was not interested in cryptocurrency, while JPMorgan researchers said the bitcoin rally is unsustainable.