Cryptocurrency Market Cap Passes $2 Trillion as Ethereum Prices Reach All-Time High
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Don’t expect cryptocurrency miners to stop buying up the best graphics cards any time soon. Reuters today reported that the cryptocurrency market cap surpassed $2 trillion, a new record, as the prices for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coins attract the attention of more investors.
According to Coindesk ,Bitcoin pricing hit a 24-hour high of $59,243 at time of writing. That doesn’t quite match the cryptocurrency’s all-time high price of $61,556 but it was still a 1.21% increase over the previous day and a sign of the coin’s stability.
Bitcoin can maintain a $1 trillion market cap all on its own if its price stays above $53,000, Reuters said. Coindesk’s price info shows that it’s been hovering around that threshold since mid-February and hasn’t dropped below it since March 8.
Bitcoin wasn’t the only coin contributing to this $2 trillion market cap, however. Ethereum reached its all-time highest price of $2,144 on Friday; it’s sitting at $2,106 at time of writing. Other coins have also enjoyed price increases over the last day.
Much of this growth has been attributed to more investors buying into the crypto market. Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in February, for example, and trading apps like Robinhood have pushed to make crypto trading more accessible.
These price increases are good news for cryptocurrency miners, but people hoping to upgrade their builds with new graphics cards for gaming might be disappointed that the crypto market will continue to affect GPU supplies. When the best GPUs for mining go out of stock, miners are sure to turn to whatever’s available.
MSI and Asus have already warned that the ongoing GPU shortage will lead to higher graphics cards prices throughout 2021—and that was before reports indicated that water rationing in Taiwan could affect GPU production if conditions don’t improve.
Rumor has it that Nvidia has resorted to increasing production of the outdated GTX 1050 Ti, 1650 and RTX 2060 in an attempt to give manufacturers something they can sell to gamers. But that isn’t much of a consolation when the RTX 30-series exists.
All of which means the crypto market cap passing the $2 trillion mark probably isn’t great news for gamers. For anyone interested in joining the mining frenzy, however, now’s an appropriate time to check out our guides explaining how to mine Ethereum and how to optimize your GPU for mining Ethereum.
A Memorable March: Bitcoin and Ethereum Adoption Skyrockets
One year later, and March 2021 already seems somewhat better from all standpoints. But, when it comes to the crypto industry, this last month has been one of the most prosperous in the sector’s entire history, especially when it comes to adoption and the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
March 2021 boosts crypto adoption
The past 31 days have brought a lot of progress to the cryptocurrency industry, but it could be said that the adoption has seen the most progress. Institutional investors have been overcoming their fear of cryptocurrency for over a year now, and with each passing month, they have been more and more encouraged to join the crypto sector and help it grow. Companies like Grayscale and MicroStrategy have invested millions into crypto on behalf of their clients, and despite recent dips, institutions continue to invest. Grayscale even launched new crypto products only a few weeks ago.
Major financial institutions like JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have started offering crypto products, and even the Deutsche Bank openly stated that cryptocurrencies can no longer be ignored.
This last month revealed that Tesla has bought over $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin. This month, however, its CEO, Elon Musk, announced that the electric car company will now start accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment.
Another report revealed that Bitcoin miners managed to earn over $1.5 billion in March of this year alone, making mining one of the most profitable ways of earning Bitcoin at the moment.
And, of course, no one will soon forget that this was a month of Bitcoin ETFs, with as many as three of them emerging in Canada, one of which was launched by Galaxy Digital’s Mike Novogratz. These are the first BTC ETFs in North America, and their very existence has given US companies a new encouragement to continue to bombard the SEC with new ETF applications.
This has also been a major month for Ethereum, as its DeFi sector reached an all-time high at $46.1 billion in total value locked (TVL) in mid-March. Meanwhile, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) became one of the main topics of news and discussions, as tokenization started taking off. There were countless examples of celebrities, groups, and organizations launching NFTs, selling tokenized versions of songs, tweets, watches, and anything else that has any kind of value.
Story continues
Not to mention that Visa embraced crypto settlement, and chose Ethereum blockchain to conduct them on. Lastly, Ethereum continues to slowly implement changes that will eventually result in its transformation into Ethereum 2.0 — a better, faster, more scalable blockchain, with much cheaper transactions and greater functionalities.
Bitcoin and Ethereum hit all-time highs in March 2021
The situation regarding crypto prices was equally as good, at least for a time. Bitcoin managed to hit a new ATH earlier this month, which was followed by a major price correction. The coin reached an ATH of $61,683 on March 13th, only to correct to $54k three days later. It then attempted to reach $60k once again after that, and it succeeded, but the approaching expiration date of $6 million worth of Bitcoin options caused fears of major sell-off, resulting in an even deeper price drop that brought the coin to $51k by March 25th.
Now, only one week later, the coin is nearly back at $60k, surging rapidly over the past week, and currently sitting at $59,781.
Ethereum saw a similar price performance, however it was held back by extremely strong resistance at $1,850 for the majority of the month, and this barrier caused it to trade sideways for weeks. The coin managed to breach it only once in the past month, around the time of Bitcoin’s ATH. However, ETH did not manage to beat its February record. Instead, it only climbed to $1920 before dropping back down.
When Bitcoin options expiration date approached, ETH price was affected too due to BTC dominance, dropping to $1560 as a result. However, just like BTC, Ethereum also recovered over the past six days, and it currently pushes strongly against the resistance at $1850, which is also the coin’s price at the time of writing.
At the moment, both coins are trading in the green, with their prices surging as the new rally took over, and it would not be surprising for new ATHs to be reached in the next day. Historically speaking, crypto industry often performs very well in April and May, so the next two months have an excellent chance of bringing great price performance.
Greg Waisman, the co-founder and COO of the global payment network Mercuryo
This article was originally posted on FX Empire
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Is Ethereum the Answer for the Future of Cryptocurrency?
Since Bitcoin was the original cryptocurrency and is the one with the greatest value at the moment, it gets all the attention. This isn’t a bad thing as it mainly attracts people who are not very interested in how a cryptocurrency works. They simply want a way to make some profit off of their investment.
The thing to remember is that we are still in the early days of blockchain technology. It is evolving all the time and innovations are happening fast. The problem with Bitcoin is the fact that its blockchain is not as able to adapt as some others. Namely Ethereum.
The Ethereum blockchain was built with a robustness that Bitcoin doesn’t have. It is far more functional and is not just good as a way to create a cryptocurrency. It can serve many different roles. What affect Ethereum price will have in the future? That’s what we will explore in this article.
Smart contracts
One of the defining characteristics of the Ethereum blockchain is that it can handle the creation of smart contracts. In addition to transaction details, a block on the blockchain can also contain lots of other information. Ethereum has made it so these blocks can be used as a sort of contract called a smart contract.
Since the blockchain cannot be altered in any way, these smart contracts are gaining popularity in many different industries to store information. It is a sort of database that is spread across millions of computers instead of a single server somewhere that could be vulnerable to hacks.
The smart contract option on the blockchain is making it very popular and is causing it to raise the value of Ethereum. Since all of the smart contracts have to be verified, the reward is Ethereum so it is gaining steam and is second in value to Bitcoin as a result.
Dapps
Decentralized applications or Dapps, are another big reason the Ethereum blockchain is useful. These are just like an application that can be created to use on a smartphone with one big difference. Unlike other regular applications, dapps are built on the Ethereum blockchain so they are far more secure.
This is especially helpful when there is an in-app purchase that needs to be made so it is more secure and also very inexpensive. It is more secure since any change to the data of the app would have to be verified by the users of the blockchain. Since the change would be seen on every computer of every user, this would have no chance of going unnoticed and would not be verified.
The most popular type of dapp right now is an online casino built right onto the blockchain.
There are still some scaling issues with dapps but with the blockchain always evolving it stands to reason that these problems will be resolved at some point.
*This article has been contributed on behalf of Paxful. However, the information provided herein is not and is not intended to be, investment, financial, or other advice.