The price of the digital currency bitcoin rose by 2.4per cent to $4,742.91 on yesterday near the all-time high of $4,747.15 hit earlier in the session. So far this year, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has surged nearly 400per cent, having ended 2016 below $1,000.
At current levels, bitcoin has a market cap of $78.42 billion, larger than such companies as Starbucks Corp. SBUX, +0.54% and American Express Co. AXP, +0.58% Despite the record, bitcoin trading has been extremely volatile this year, albeit with a strong upward bias. It recently dropped more than 10%, briefly putting it into correction territory before it subsequently rebounded.
The moves come as the industry has tackled so-called scaling issues, which are intended to increase transaction sizes in the blockchain network. Traditional bitcoin participants have coalesced around a new protocol known as Segregated Witness, or SegWit., which they believe solves bitcoin’s scaling issue. Ether, bitcoin’s chief rival, runs on the Ethereum blockchain. It rose 1% to $382.21, bringing its total market cap to $36.1 billion.
While Ether remains below its intraday record above $400, hit earlier this year, it has been a far stronger performer than bitcoin in 2017, having soared more than 4,600%. It ended 2016 around $8.
The combined market cap of all digital currencies is above $170 billion, according to CoinMarketCap, a pricing and data website. That means the asset class has grown by more than $20 billion in about a week; it topped $150 billion on Aug. 23, having broke above $100 billion in early June.
