Bitcoin
BTC
The bitcoin price boom has made it a $1 trillion asset again and pushed the wider crypto market well over $2 trillion (as Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and legendary investor Warren Buffett both say this is actually the “true currency”).
Now, as traders brace for an “unprecedented” Wall Street earthquake, the price of these smaller cryptocurrencies have left the bitcoin price in the dust—with some declaring them “free money.”
Bitcoin’s historical halving that’s expected to cause crypto price chaos is just around the corner! Sign up now for the free CryptoCodex—A daily newsletter for traders, investors and the crypto-curious that will keep you ahead of the market
The bitcoin price boom has been sparked by Wall Street giants, led by $10 trillion asset manager BlackRock
BLK
“BlackRock is Godzilla-big,” Bloomberg Intelligence ETF analyst Eric Balchunas posted to X in response to a question about BlackRock’s performance. “With massive distribution, a trusted brand and they are well known in trading world (dozens of their ETFs do over $200m/day) so not surprising they breaking away in volume.”
Bitcoin ETF hype has bled into smaller cryptocurrencies, with top ten cryptocurrencies solana, an ethereum rival, and the meme-based dogecoin each adding 15% and 30% respectively over the last 24 hours. Dogecoin is up 50% since this time last week.
Sign up now for CryptoCodex—A free, daily newsletter for the crypto-curious
Bonk, a solana-based memecoin rival to dogecoin, has surged 26% over the last 24 hours, taking its weekly gains to 75%.
Elsewhere, artificial intelligence-linked cryptocurrencies, including fetch.ai, arweave and the controversial worldcoin, launched by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, have seen double-digit percentage increases in recent weeks. Arweave is up 130% over the last seven days while worldcoin has added 250% since early February.
“It’s free money,” one worldcoin user in Germany who had been issued some of the cryptocurrency in exchange for having his eyes scanned told DLNews. Worldcoin has faced a privacy backlash in some countries, with governments including Kenya and India unhappy with its approach to harvesting people’s biometric data in return for cryptocurrencies.
The AI crypto boom has been turbo-charged by chip maker Nvidia, which last week reported revenue of $22 billion, up nearly 270% from same period the year before and smashing already sky-high Wall Street expectations, as it’s chief executive hailed an AI-led computing “tipping point.”
First appeared on www.forbes.com