The price of bitcoin soared Friday, bringing the value of all bitcoins created since 2009 to more than $ 1 trillion, in a market driven by announcements from major companies.
At around 16:40 GMT, Bitcoin hit a new all-time high of $ 54,790.
With more than 18.6 million bitcoins created since its launch in 2009 by anonymous people, the market as a whole may represent more than $ 1,015 trillion, according to the coinmarketcap.com page.
Since the start of the year, bitcoin’s price has risen 89%, sparking fears of a bubble similar to 2017.
On Friday, Elon Musk, whose company Tesla, contributed to the price spike by announcing it had bought $ 1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, defended his group’s decision on Twitter.
When the currency has negative interest, you should be an idiot not to look any furtherhe claimed, adding that “bitcoin is almost as dumb as fiat money, I insist it is ‘almost’,” he wrote.
Proponents of Bitcoin see the decentralized network created by anonymous people in 2008 as a means of protecting themselves from central bank actions.
In the past months, many financial companies showed interest in cryptocurrency.
From the giant of online payments Paypal, in October, to the investment fund behemoth BlackRock in late January, to the oldest bank on Wall Street, BNY Mellon, countless US financial players have announced plans to launch services to leverage of or sell cryptocurrencies.
“Very speculative”
But bitcoin’s insatiable growth is worrying financial analysts who believe that after increasing its prices fivefold in one year, the bubble is likely to burst.
“Musk’s tweets have changed everything in recent weeks, we are not talking about rational purchases,” said a cryptocurrency broker who asked for anonymity.
On the other hand, central banks often criticize cryptocurrencies, as did the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde, who called bitcoin a “highly speculative asset” in February.
At more than a trillion dollars, the market for this currency theoretically exceeds the market cap of Tesla or the Chinese group Tencent, and is close to the level of Alphabet, Google’s parent company (1.4 trillion dollars).
However, some economists caution that the equations are incorrect, since the sales amount of a currency is not the same as that of a company. According to the Chainalysis Cabinet, one-fifth of Bitcoin has not changed hands in more than five years.