According to Reuters the price of Bitcoin reached an all-time high today as Coinbase, a platform for buying and selling cryptocurrency, prepared for its initial public offering. The company is set to be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange today under the “COIN” ticker symbol.
Coinbase said in the IPO announcement that it‘s “building the cryptoeconomy—a more fair, accessible, efficient, and transparent financial system enabled by crypto.” Time will tell if it will ever realize that goal. As for the company’s effect on Bitcoin’s value, well, that became obvious in the hours leading up to its listing on Nasdaq.
Bitcoin’s price reached $63,191 today, according to Coindesk, which said that is the cryptocurrency’s all-time highest value. It previously peaked at $60,743 per coin in March before the price started to fluctuate between around $55,000 and $59,000.
Those prices make Bitcoin the most significant cryptocurrency by far in terms of market cap. The crypto market writ large had a market cap of $2 trillion earlier this month; Bitcoin represented over $1 trillion of that figure by itself. This new $63,191 peak is well above the $42,000 per coin price needed to maintain that milestone.
Leading the crypto market also means that what’s good for Bitcoin can be good for other cryptocurrencies. Coindesk’s figures indicate that Ethereum’s price has risen fairly steadily throughout the week to a current per-coin value of $2,220 despite a drop earlier in the month. Those increases could be related to Bitcoin’s rise.
That isn’t necessarily good news for enthusiasts looking for the best graphics cards, because Ethereum miners are making it even harder to find recent GPUs in stock amid the global chip shortage, but early cryptocurrency adopters might be able to cash in on Coinbase’s efforts to normalize crypto in the mainstream market.
The silver lining: Bitcoin mining is far more resource-intensive than Ethereum mining. An industrial miner recently purchased $30 million worth of Nvidia’s Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) offerings. Anyone serious about mining Bitcoin isn’t going to be competing with enthusiasts over a single graphics card.