Bitcoin, increasingly referred to as “digital gold”, has hit a new all-time high, pushing the silver market capitalization above $71,000.
It's a milestone that Bitcoin has seen repeatedly since early March.
On Friday afternoon, Bitcoin broke above $70,000 for the first time. Then on Monday morning the price of Bitcoin started to climb and at the time of this writing it was $71,239.37. It has gained 2.7% since yesterday and 11.4% since last week.
As usual, the all-time high price depends on which exchange or price aggregator you check. At approximately 9:20 CET, the price of BTC on Coinbase was $71,700; $71,560 on CoinGecko; and $71,607 on CoinMarketCap.
A snapshot of the Bitcoin market cap compared to the Silver market cap. Source: Infinite Market Cap
Just three months ago, the space's approval began to build when Bitcoin ETFs began to be built, where Bitcoin overtook Elon Musk's electric vehicle company Tesla, Facebook, Instagram and the parent company of WhatsApp, and Bitcoin rival Warren Buffett's multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway.
This makes Bitcoin the eighth-largest newly minted, with a market cap of $1.4 trillion. In addition to gold, which holds the top spot with a market cap of $14.7 trillion, it is still behind Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Saudi Aramco, Amazon and Google's parent company Alphabet.
Why is a price rally necessary? One big reason is the impending Bitcoin halving. The latest estimate is that the halving will be in 35 days, on April 15, according to NiceHash.
Bitcoin's halving will reduce the reward paid to Bitcoin miners for producing new blocks on the network. It has happened three times since Bitcoin came into existence. This fourth halving reduced the Bitcoin reward from 6.25 BTC to 2.125 BTC.
Meanwhile, Ethereum regained $4,000 this morning for the first time since 2021 after seeing it on Friday. At the time of writing, ETH seems to have found little resistance. After gaining 1.3% since yesterday and 13.6% since last week, Ethereum is now at $3,992.13.
In terms of market cap, Ethereum's $480 billion makes it larger than the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust and is quickly closing in on Walmart's $484 billion market cap, according to Infinite Market Cap.
ETH has its own shocking news as a tailwind this week. Over the course of two days, Ethereum devs will take care of the Denku update. It's expected to make Ethereum transactions incredibly fast and cheap, devs told Decrypt last week.
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