Bitcoin surges past $28,000; Market Cap Tops Half a Trillion Dollars

Bitcoin has once again hit a new all-time high. Today, Bitcoin surpassed $28,000 and achieved a market capitalization of half a trillion dollars.

Bitcoin’s current price is $28,288, an increase of 13.55% in the past 24 hours. Its market cap, as of this writing, is $524,821,161,327, per metrics site CoinMarketCap.

This marks an increase in the price of Bitcoin of almost $4,000 in two days, and an increase of 20% in the past week.

Bitcoin’s bull run started in earnest in October, when its price was about $10,500. It has nearly tripled since then. Bitcoin’s price is almost seven times its price in mid-March, when global markets tumbled amid the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, taking the crypto market with them. The influx of institutional investors is frequently cited as the reason for its current boom. 

Meanwhile, the price of Ethereum has increased by 3.5% in the past 24 hours to $645. Ethereum boomed this past summer when decentralized finance protocols—mostly Ethereum-based non-custodial exchanges, lending protocols and synthetic assets—took off.

 The price of XRP has declined by about 5% in the past day and by 50% in the past week; its creators are embroiled in a fresh lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which earlier this week alleged that Ripple, as well as its co-founder and CEO, have raised well over a billion dollars in unregistered securities sales.