Bitcoin bull run continues as price soars nearly 4X in 3 months; market cap crosses $730B mark

A year back, on January 10, 2020, it was $7,808. It crawled till around the same date in October to hit the $10,897 mark. But for many and almost out of the blue, the price of Bitcoin was slingshotted past the $41,000-mark to hit a new all-time high of $41,660, as per data from Coindesk. In fact, it has almost doubled from $21,310 (as of December 17, 2020) in less than a month and appreciated nearly 4X since October. The price of cryptocurrency king Bitcoin has been hitting new all-time highs almost on a daily basis. However, at last check, Bitcoin was back to $39,104 price on Saturday.

Importantly, the market cap of Bitcoin stood at $732 billion, as per CoinMarketCap, far ahead of the $136 billion market cap of the second most valued cryptocurrency – Ethereum, which is currently traded at $1,194. To put it in the perspective of the market cap of large financial service companies, the $732 billion market cap was near twice as much of companies such as Visa ($474 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($414 billion), Mastercard ($352 billion), according to the data from Companiesmarketcap. In fact, it is theoretically higher than the market cap of companies such as Alibaba ($642 billion), Berkshire Samsung ($526 billion), Walmart ($414 billion), and even higher than that of other large consumer brands such as Coca Cola, and McDonald’s.

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In a recent note published by JPMorgan, the investment bank predicted Bitcoin’s price rise could be as high as $146,000 in long term to compete with gold as an ‘alternative’ currency. “A crowding out of gold as an ‘alternative’ currency implies big upside for Bitcoin over the long term,” strategists at JPMorgan wrote, Bloomberg reported. However, “a convergence in volatilities between Bitcoin and gold is unlikely to happen quickly and is in our mind a multiyear process. This implies that the above-$146,000 theoretical Bitcoin price target should be considered as a long-term target, and thus an unsustainable price target for this year.” The market cap of Bitcoin, which is calculated by multiplying the price by the total number of coins in circulation, would have to rise 4.6 times to match the $2.7 trillion of private sector gold investment.