Bitcoin made new history on Friday, generating a ton of buzz on Wall Street and Main Street, as well as social media platforms, as the world’s # 1 cryptocurrency staged a sharp rally that put its market value well above $ 1 trillion.
At the last check, a single bitcoin traded near a record $ 54,827.69, up 5%, pushing crypto written in code in 2009 to a total market cap of $ 1 trillion.
Dow Jones market data via CoinMarketCap
The stratospheric rise of the digital asset created by a person or individuals known as Satoshi Nakamoto prompted investors to put the historic movement into perspective on Twitter.
A tweet focused on the Nakamoto email that led to the birth of the digital asset, created in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Nakamoto is credited with writing the software that created the decentralized currency as challenging the perception that central banks were printing fiat currencies such as dollars DXY,
and euros EURUSD,
with reckless abandon to paper about the cracks in the financial system caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.
A total value of a trillion dollars is memorable for the blockchain-backed asset, which was worth a fraction of a penny at the start, but caught the attention of the financial world even in the beginning, as this tweet from the Twitter handle related with crypto trading platform Krakken reports, referring to Mike Myers character Dr. Evil:
Bitcoin prices have been on a tear. They are up nearly 90% in 2021. For comparison: gold GC00,
a competitor of the digital asset as a store of value, has fallen by more than 6% since the beginning of the year.
Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA,
is up more than 3% so far this year, the S&P 500 index SPX,
is up more than 4%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP,
almost 8% has returned.
Bitcoin’s rise since its inception is perhaps even more impressive than its recent run, as the following chart shows.
Cameron Winklevoss, who has made growing the cryptocurrency market a mission along with his twin brother Tyler, tweeted about bitcoin’s evolution from a white paper to a $ 1 trillion idea.
The Harvard-educated twins bought $ 11 million worth of bitcoins in 2013, according to a report in the New York Times, and that’s now worth billions.
A tweet from Tyler Winklevoss hit hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, who said on CNBC Friday that he didn’t pay much attention to digital assets like bitcoin. “I just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about cryptocurrencies … I don’t see the economics of cryptocurrencies,” Griffin told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “I understand how to value a stock – the net present value of income – I understand how to think about currency rates around the world,” said Citadel LLC founder.
Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research, compared the move in bitcoin to Tesla’s epic run to a trillion dollar market value. In some ways, that comparison is considered appropriate because it was the electric vehicle manufacturer’s announcement last week that it was investing $ 1.5 billion in bitcoin and would eventually accept the cryptocurrency for its products that likely contributed significantly to the latest spike. in the bitcoin price.
Tesla’s stock TSLA,
is considered a speculative asset in its own right, similar to bitcoin, and CEO Elon Musk is seen as the embodiment of many of the libertarian tendencies that underpinned the founding of crypto 12 years ago.
And if it’s hard to really think about the size of a $ 1 trillion asset, here’s an illustration that could put it in perspective.
Sure, bitcoin with a total value of $ 1 trillion, representing about 60% of the value of all cryptos tracked by CoinMarketCap, still pales in comparison to gold, which had a total market value of about $ 9 trillion, including jewelry. and precious metal as exchange traded funds.
However, Anthony Pompliano, co-founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital Assets, speculated that bitcoin could surpass gold by 2029.