The Financial Times’ recent article, “Bitcoin hits all-time high in Argentine pesos” states that Bitcoin has proven to be a better store of value than the Argentine peso over the past 12 months.
Coming from the paradigm of established finance and long term critic of cryptocurrencies, to indirectly compare a regular currency to a crypto, could be understood as a step forward for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.
Bitcoin gained 114% since 1 April
Over the last 8 weeks, the cryptocurrency market has boomed with the leading currencies making strong gains in value. Bitcoin gained 114% since 1 April; Ethereum jumped by 90% and Ripple’s XRP rose 33%.
To further testify to the positive sentiment, as of writing, Bitcoin rose 10.84% in 24 hours – taking its value to $8,818. Ethereum performed equally impressively with an 8.82% gain in the last 24 hours as did XRP jumping 8.51% for the same time frame.
The three leading cryptocurrencies alone make up just over $200 billion in market capitalisation, pumping a collective volume of $41 billion per day.
Cryptocurrencies Continue Bullish
Significant interest, institutional investor participation and increased volume, indicate a bullish sentiment towards the three cryptocurrencies and could potentially lead to even stronger institutional acceptance.
Bitcoin has been proving doomsayers wrong with its notable price appreciation since April 2019.
Bitcoin Reaches $6.3 billion of transaction per day!
Bitcoin is the biggest digital asset and continually impacts the price growth of the other cryptcurrencies owing to its market dominance. Bitcoin’s daily transaction volume is in third place below the likes of Visa and MasterCard with just over $6.3 billion of transactions each day.
Ripple on the other hand, sits in third place and has shown nearly equal gains recently, albeit the token or digital asset is significantly different to its other two contenders – Bitcoin and Ethereum, and targets a different client base, namely institutional clients such as banks and funds.
Ripple – A different breed of crypto
XRP – the Ripple token, benefits from fast international transactions. Averaging one transaction every four seconds, significantly faster than Bitcoin’s one transaction per hour. Further appeal comes from Ripple’s original design – as a day to day payment system, which renders it safer than Bitcoin. Its popularity within traditional finance can be attested to by XRP currency adoption and attendant protocols by over 200 banks world-wide.
Ethereum Builds on Bitcoin’s Blockchain Base
Ethereum on the other hand, shares much with Bitcoin, in particular the blockchain, but is a relatively recent arrival to cryptos– 2015, compared to Bitcoin which appeared in 2009. Ethereum is much faster than Bitcoin and also pushes the blockchain further – operating as a store of value with supporters seeing it as a platform for distributed computing, and which also allows for the creation of other cryptocurrencies.
As we can see, these three cryptocurrencies dominate the crypto market and are increasingly being adopted by more and more financial institutions as they make their way towards mainstream acceptance.