Bitcoin Price Breaks Past $4,000 as Crypto Market Cap Grows to $140 Billion
The bitcoin price broke past $4,000 on Wednesday, headlining another generally-positive day for the crypto markets. Few cryptocurrencies made eye-catching movements, but most made moderate progress to extend the early-week market recovery. Altogether, the markets added another $4 billion, bringing their combined capitalization above the $140 billion threshold.
The total cryptocurrency market cap began the day at $136.1 billion. It spent most of the day on an incline, eventually reaching $141.8 billion at the time of writing. The crypto market cap has grown by about $10 billion since the start of the week, potentially indicating that traders are adjusting to the post-China bitcoin exchange ban environment.
Bitcoin headlined the market advance with a march past $4,000. The bitcoin price had been trading at this level a week ago but had succumbed to downward pressure leading into the weekend, eventually reaching a weekly low of $3,555 on September 22. However, it reversed course after reaching that mark and began to scale the charts once again. Wednesday morning, bitcoin broke through $4,000 and has continued to climb, bringing its present value to $4,074. This translates into a $67 billion market cap.
One factor influencing bitcoin’s continued climb is the continued development of Asian cryptocurrency infrastructure following China’s hostile stance toward order-book exchanges. Both South Korea and Japan are expected to fill the void left by Chinese bitcoin exchange giants such as OKCoin, Huobi, and BTCC. To that end, a popular Korean messaging platform has announced plans to create a major cryptocurrency exchange, while NXC–a Korean holding company for the $10 billion Japanese gaming firm Nexon–has just purchased a majority stake in Korbit, Korea’s second-largest bitcoin exchange.
The ethereum price did not make significant movement on Wednesday, but it did inch a little bit closer to $300. After beginning the day at $291, the ethereum price dipped below $290 before eventually recovering past that mark Wednesday morning. At present, the ethereum price is trading at $294, which represents a 24-hour increase of about 1%. Ethereum now has a market cap of $27.9 billion.
The altcoin markets made moderate gains on Wednesday, although there were a few outliers on both ends of the performance spectrum.
Altcoin Price Chart from CoinMarketCap
The most significant altcoin movement came from Ripple, whose price rose 12% the day after the FinTech startup announced a new office in Singapore. The Ripple price is now trading at $0.204, which gives the centralized cryptocurrency a market cap of $7.8 billion.
Ripple Price Chart from CoinMarketCap
This surge gave Ripple the momentum it needed to leap over bitcoin cash in the market cap rankings and regain its status as the third-largest cryptocurrency. Bitcoin cash, meanwhile, declined close to 1% for the day, reducing its price to $450 and market cap to $7.5 billion.
The litecoin price rose another 3%, while 6th-place Dash held steady at $342. NEM added 2% to its market cap, which now sits just above the $2.1 billion threshold. The NEO price continued to surge, rising another 17% to $31 and 8th place in the rankings. IOTA–another outlier–declined 3%, while 10th-place Monero rose 4% to bring its price to $96.
By Josiah Wilmoth on cryptocoinsnews.com