The cryptocurrency market is now worth more than the world’s most valuable company.
The combined value of all cryptocurrencies overtook the market cap of Apple on Wednesday morning, amid record-breaking price rallies for bitcoin, ethereum (ether) and dogecoin.
All three cryptocurrencies experienced new all-time highs over the last 24 hours, with one bitcoin now worth more than $64,000, one ethereum worth $2,350, and one dogecoin worth $0.13 at the time of writing.
The combined gains pushed the cryptocurrency market above $2.2 trillion – $10 billion above Apple’s market cap.
Bitcoin alone is now valued at more than $1.2 trillion, ranking it above Facebook and Tesla, having risen in price by more than 1,000 per cent since April last year.
Bitcoin’s recent gains mean the world’s first cryptocurrency is also now worth more than the combined market caps of payments giants Mastercard, PayPal and Visa.
It still remains a long way off the overall value of gold, though it is catching up quickly on silver.
The cryptocurrency market milestone comes on the day that Coinbase goes public on the Nasdaq stock market, making it the first ever company specialising in cryptocurrencies to launch an initial public offering (IPO).
The stock market debut for one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges has been dubbed a coming-of-age moment for the crypto industry, with some estimating valuations in the region of $100 billion.
“The Coinbase IPO could well serve as a gateway drug to crypto,” Asen Kostadinov, a strategy manager at London cryptocurrency custody provider Copper, told The Independent.
“Coinbase is a credible, regulated, profitable blue-chip tech stock. The IPO will result in new types of investors entering the crypto space... Institutional adoption of crypto has clearly gone through a major inflection point since the last quarter of 2020, which speaks to the maturity and credibility of the space.”
