Crypto market cap tops jaw-dropping $2T mark in three months from $1T driven by Bitcoin, Ethereum, others

The total market cap of all cryptocurrencies has topped $2 trillion for the first time with Bitcoin dominating 54.1 per cent of it at $1.09 trillion market cap, according to the data from crypto tracker CoinGecko. The $1 trillion addition to the overall market cap has occurred in the blink of an eye as the value doubled from $1 trillion as of January 7, 2021, in the following three months. CoinGecko has been tracking the crypto market cap since April 29, 2013, when the overall value was $1.66 billion. The market cap of 6,634 coins tracked stood at $2.03 trillion at the time of filing this report.

The growth has come on the back of a strong rally witnessed in prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other altcoins apart from growing interest among retail and institutional investors to engage with cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has grown over 100 per cent in price from $29,022 on January 1, 2021, to near $59,000 so far even as it had topped the $61,000-mark last month. While Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, BlackRock, others have been dabbling in bitcoin, payment firms including PayPal and Square Cash have allowed their customers to buy and sell Bitcoin.

Total Market Cap of 6,634 Cryptocurrencies

Likewise, Bitcoin’s rival Ethereum has jumped 184 per cent from $738 on New Year’s Day to $2,097 on Tuesday. While Bitcoin has been an all-time favourite, it is perhaps the buzz created by Ethereum that has helped catapult the overall market cap of all cryptos. Its use beyond just processing crypto transactions such as to enable the deployment of smart contracts and decentralized apps so far to be created and operated without any fraud or interference from third parties, unlike Bitcoin has attracted investors.

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“The current trend of rising crypto market valuation is due to people turning towards altcoins like Ether, XRP, and Stellar. Simultaneously, people are also getting to know about projects (coins) whose 80-90 per cent supply are controlled by the creator and they are exhibiting huge pumps, with the sole purpose of attracting investors. And this too is a part of this $2 trillion economy that we are talking about. In fact, a lot of pre-chains built on Ethereum and DOT (mostly leveraging the branding of DOT) are doing huge pumps of x50 and x100, that too in absence of a concrete business model or product,” Kumar Gaurav- Founder and CEO at crypto banking platform Cashaa told The Outlooker Online.

While Bitcoin has been the world’s largest financial service in the world with its value surpassing the market cap of Visa, Ethereum had also recently broken into the top 10 list of financial services players globally with a market cap of $243.62 billion. The coin was ahead of the market cap of China Construction Bank that had a market cap of $210 billion followed by Agricultural Bank of China ($176.31 billion), SoftBank ($159.20 billion) at nine, and Citigroup ($151.80 billion) ranked at number 10, according to the data from CompaniesMarketCap.

“Probably the biggest factor is the growing NFT market, which is largely powered by Ethereum. NFTs are getting a lot of mainstream attention. NFTs aren’t just for digital art and collectibles, they can store all forms of intellectual property and agreements, giving them huge potential. A lot of the other currencies are also associated with larger use cases, like decentralized finance, which has the potential to bring a lot of financial inclusion and opportunity. In short, the valuation is based on real value. These are use cases that go far beyond price speculation,” Vikram Rangala, CMO, ZebPay, told The Outlooker Online.

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