The trillion-dollar market value club has a new member: bitcoin. The total number of bitcoins trading are now collectively worth more than $1 trillion.
That’s because the price of a bitcoin hit a number of new all-time highs Friday. One bitcoin currently costs around $55,000 — and there are about 18.6 million bitcoins in circulation according to Coinbase. (The total number of bitcoin eventually available is capped at 21 million.)
Of course, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison to look at bitcoin versus big firms with sky-high valuations like Apple. But for what it’s worth, only four companies in the United States currently are worth more than bitcoin: Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN) and Google owner Alphabet (GOOGL).
Bitcoin currently is worth about $225 billion more than Tesla (TSLA), the company that is most responsible for the most recent surge in the cryptocurrency’s price.
The Elon Musk-led electric car juggernaut announced earlier this month that it now owns $1.5 billion’s worth of bitcoin in its corporate coffers. Tesla also said it was looking at letting consumers use bitcoin to buy its cars and SUVs.
That news has sparked speculation that other big companies may soon add bitcoin or other cryptocurrncies to their balance sheets, since bitcoin is generating a significantly higher return than bonds and cash.
Corporate America is validating bitcoin. Payments giants Square (SQ) and PayPal (PYPL)let their users buy and sell it. Credit card processing behemoths Visa (V) and Mastercard (MA) are also embracing cryprocurrencies.
