“The cryptocurrency market is growing with astonishing speed,” explains one market analyst.
The cryptocurrency market surpassed three trillion dollars for the first time on Monday, in a context of greater interest from traditional finance and investors, seduced by vertiginous rises, but worried about inflation.
The cryptocurrency market represented on Monday around 10:00 GMT (5:00 AM in Ecuador) $ 3.7 trillion, according to the CoinGecko page, which monitors the market for more than 10,000 cryptocurrencies.
As is often the case in that sector, analysts had difficulty explaining the significant increase on Monday.
“The cryptocurrency market is growing with astonishing speed,” Ipek Ozkardeskaya, market analyst for SwissQuote, told AFP. For her, there is “a part of speculation and a part of reality.”
Since the end of October, US markets have access to an index fund (ETF) to the evolution of bitcoin, which allows investors to bet on the rise of the first cryptocurrency without leaving Wall Street.
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Contrary to the euro or the dollar, the number of bitcoins was set at 21 million, which are issued little by little, a rule impossible to change without controlling the integrity of the decentralized network.
Some investors therefore believe that cryptocurrencies are a way to hedge against inflation, which is increasing in both Europe and North America.
“It is a very risky strategy given how volatile the cryptocurrency is and seeing how its value can suffer pressure from regulators, or even comments on social networks,” Susannah Streeter, market analyst for Hargreaves Lansdown, warns in a note.
Price changes of the main cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin (at $ 66,035 at 10:10 GMT) was approaching its all-time high, while Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency in terms of market size, was up 2% at $ 4,727, after previously skyrocketing to a new high of $ 4,768.
Both bitcoin and ethereum represent over 40% and just under 20% of the market, respectively. The volatility of small cryptocurrencies is higher.
Shiba Inu, a crypto asset created to rival Dogecoin, reached a theoretical size of $ 40 billion at the end of October, becoming the 10th largest cryptocurrency. But a few days later, he lost $ 10 billion.
“Today’s champions are unlikely to be tomorrow’s survivors,” stresses Ozkardeskaya, who fears “a bubble of the same type as the Internet” in the 2000s. (I)
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