Bitcoin’s dominant performance over the past five months has brought the world’s largest cryptocurrency into the 10 largest global assets by market capitalisation after flipping Warren Buffet’s legendary investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway.
Bitcoin flipped Berks in the latter half of last week amid a bull run that just pushed the BTC/USD pair above $50,000 for the first time in over two years.
The last time Bitcoin hit these price levels was back in December 2021, at the culmination of an unprecedented cryptocurrency bull run where Bitcoin soared to $69,000.
Following that period, the cryptocurrency markets have been plagued by a series of challenges, including widespread bank runs, insolvencies, fraud trials, and an overarching climate of negativity.
However, things changed in mid-2023 with the growing anticipation of broader access to bitcoin markets through the introduction of spot-bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
By January, this anticipation became a reality as regulatory approval was granted to industry giants like BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale, and WisdomTree, allowing them to list their ETFs on the regulated US stock market.
The spot bitcoin markets initially remained indifferent to this development, but a positive price shock has since materialised.
Bitcoin’s market capitalisation is currently around $980 billion against Berkshire’s $862 billion.
What else is in the top 10?
A market tracker provided by Companies Market Cap shows gold as the largest asset class across public companies, precious metals, cryptocurrencies and ETFs with a $13.7 trillion market cap.
The remainder of the list is as follows:
- Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT): $3.08 trillion
- Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL, ETR:APC): $2.9 trillion
- Saudi Aramco: $2.04 trillion
- Google parent Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG): $1.84 trillion
- Nvidia Corporation: $1.78 trillion
- Silver: $1.29 trillion
- Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, ETR:FB2A, SWX:FB): $1.19 trillion
Values were taken as of Tuesday 13 February.