Bitcoin in the Big Leagues. With further significant increases in the price of bitcoin over the past few days, bypassing the $9,000 and with the $10,000 milestone well within sight, they are now aiming for the big guns in the currency world.
In terms of market cap, it has now been shown that bitcoin is the 30th largest currency in the globe today. It currently is now valued greater than traditional fiat currencies such as the United Arab Emirates Dirham and the Singapore dollar. It is currently getting close to the market cap that is seen in the likes of global behemoths in the world of financial transactions, MasterCard.
Between the start of 2017 and November, bitcoin has seen its market valuation constantly rise, starting at just under $15 billion and rising all of the way up to $156 billion today. This is why everyone from investment banks, massive hedge funds and institutional investors have sat up and taken notice of what has been going on and getting involved in the markets.
The demand for digital currencies has never been great, with it expanding by the day as it is becoming more and more mainstream. The general public is now educating themselves about the likes of bitcoin and see if there is potential for them to get involved by investing in it.
CME Group recently announced that before the end of the year they will be opening up a bitcoin futures contracts product which will lead to an even greater influx of outside money being invested into bitcoin.
This is why Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase has estimated that there will be a further $10 billion invested into the bitcoin market over the next few months in institutional money, which will more than likely see the market cap of bitcoin expand by more than $100 billion and further gaining ground against fiat currencies.
Even though there is only a handful of a major provider of financial services and institutions having service for bitcoin, it has still managed to bypass the market cap of some of the biggest financial firms in the world, like Goldman Sachs. MasterCard is behind Visa as the most used card network in the world and bitcoin is set to soon surpass MasterCard that has a current market cap of $171 billion.
Every day there are more and more cryptocurrencies coming out through the process of ICOs and the likes of ethereum are also hitting all-time highs. It is an exciting time to watch the markets and see how they react in particular to when CME Group finally open up their bitcoin futures contracts.
This will see massive amounts of institutional money enter the system, some of which may be too short the cryptocurrency, whereas the large portion of it being long on the likes of bitcoin.
There are still critics of digital currencies on Wall Street but at the end of the day, they need to think about their bottom line, which is why many critics are being forced to eat their words and get invested in bitcoin and the likes.
Educating myself more on bitcoins recently….High five 😀