Bitcoin is now the eleventh most capitalised asset in the world after it surpassed Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba on Wednesday.
The market cap of the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency eclipsed the e-commerce conglomerate by $3 billion after it reached $673 buoyed by a new all-time high price of $36,198. The crypto asset has already surpassed companies like Berkshire Hathaway, Samsung, and Visa.
It now requires about $23 billion to be on par with Tesla which currently occupies the tenth position on the list dominated by Gold.
Bitcoin (BTC) has received an unprecedented amount of attention from institutional investors. Recently MicroStrategy, the largest independent publicly-traded business intelligence company increased its bitcoin holdings from 38,250 BTC worth $425 million to 70,470 bitcoin valued at $1.3 billion.
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Apart from institutional investors, the demand for bitcoin has soared. There is significantly more demand for bitcoin than there is supply. About 900 new bitcoin are mined every day, and three market participants alone – PayPal, Square, and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust – have bought considerably more bitcoin a day because of high investor demand.
Experts project that should the surge in demand continues, bitcoin would possibly see higher prices in the coming days.
“It would not be outlandish to say that we could see something approaching the $100,000 mark before the year’s end. Bitcoin has typically surged in times of economic trouble, which has played a big role in bitcoin’s surge in 2020. We’ve seen it outperform even the most reliable of safe-havens in gold, and with more economies around the world printing money and weakening the value of their own currencies – an issue not inherent to bitcoin – it will continue to serve as a more appealing option to investors,” Marcus Swanepoel, CEO of Luno said via mail.
Gold is currently the most capitalised asset in the world at $12.374 trillion. In a note to investors on Tuesday, JPMorgan said bitcoin is likely to outshine gold as millennials become a more important component of the investment market over time and given their preference for “digital gold” over traditional bullion.
The financial conglomerate went on to project that the price of bitcoin could reach $146,000 if it becomes established as a safe-haven asset.
“Considering how big the financial investment into gold is, a crowding out of gold as an ‘alternative’ currency implies big upside for bitcoin over the long term,” JPMorgan said in its note.
