Cryptocurrency market value tops $2 trillion for first time
The cryptocurrency market’s total value climbed past $2 trillion for the first time this week as big-name corporations continued to embrace the digital assets.
Cryptocurrency’s market capitalization crossed the milestone Monday evening before dropping to about $1.99 trillion late Tuesday morning, according to crypto data tracker CoinGecko.com.
That puts cryptocurrencies on par with the value of massive publicly traded companies such as Apple and Saudi Aramco, whose market caps have also hit $2 trillion in recent years.
“The crypto market is facilitating the greatest wealth transfer in the history of the world,” Brock Pierce, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, told The Post.
“The underlying technology is remarkable, but the power and influence associated with $2 trillion of wealth being in the hands of new people, we have never seen the influence be in the hands of the ‘new powers that be,'” he added.
The crypto market has roughly doubled in value in a little more than two months as a growing number of companies hopped on the bandwagon.
Wall Street titan Morgan Stanley, for instance, recently started offering bitcoin investments to its wealthy clients, according to CNBC. And PayPal announced last week that it would enable customers to pay with cryptocurrency at millions of online stores.
More than half the market is concentrated in bitcoin, which is worth nearly $1.1 trillion at a price of $57,871.46 per coin, CoinGecko data show.
The latest spike, however, appeared to be fueled by Ether, which is the second-largest digital coin by market value. Its price has surged 181 percent this year and climbed as high as $2,151.25 late Monday before slipping Tuesday morning, according to CoinDesk.
Ether runs on the Ethereum blockchain network, which also powers much of the booming market for non-fungible tokens, the digital collectibles craze that’s attracted everyone from the NBA to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The Christie’s auction house even reportedly took Ether as payment for an NFT by the digital artist Beeple that sold for $69 million last month.
“The interest and attention surrounding NFT’s is certainly contributing to the recent rise,” Pierce said.
