Soaring Ahead: Bitcoin Prices double in 2017 to $2000 in just 5 months

The world’s most popular cryptocurrency is now worth over $2,000 per coin.  That’s according to a range of bitcoin exchanges, including Coinbase and Kraken. That valuation puts the total market cap of bitcoin — the total number of coins in circulation — at $32.92 billion.

Bitcoin first broke the $1,000 valuation mark way back in 2013, but a combination of factors — including the implosion of then-top exchange Mount Gox — saw the currency drop in value. Support from financial institutions trialed bitcoin and blockchain-based services, and a general stability following new regulation in China, saw bitcoin return to the $1,000 mark again at the end of last year. Since then, its valuation has continued to grow consistently through 2017. The price of a coin rose 12 percent over the past week alone.

But bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency on the rise. Ripple, the centralized currency that is aiming to be a settlement protocol for major banks, has surged more than 10x, or 1000% in under a month making it now the second most valuable cryptocurrency (only behind bitcoin) in circulation.

Similarly, ethereum, a cryptocurrency designed to function as a blockchain-based computing platform for developers, is now trading $130 per coin with a total market cap of just under $12B, which represents a a little more than a 2x increase over the last month.

The result of these increases is that bitcoin no longer constitutes the majority of the market cap for all cryptocurrencies. Today the total market cap of bitcoin represents just 47% of total cryptocurrencies – up until a few months ago it consistently hovered around 80%.

Japan accounted for nearly 55 percent of trade volume, up from near 40 percent Thursday, according to CryptoCompare.com.

Prices for bitcoin on the Hong Kong-based Bitfinex exchange rose, narrowing a recent gap with the global rate in anticipation that bitcoin traded on Bitfinex can soon be easily converted to U.S. dollars.

Chris Burniske, a blockchain products lead analyst at fund manager ARK Invest, pointed out in a tweet Saturday that the difference between Chinese and U.S. exchanges for the price of the digital currency narrowed from a 20 percent gap to 5 percent in just a week.