Ethereum price cracks US$700, bitcoin overtakes VISA

Bitcoin corrects, Ethereum surpasses US$700 and Ripple’s XRP braces for a sell-off. Market update.

Bitcoin hodlers were able to enjoy a particularly fat present at Christmas: the Christ Child put one all-time high after another under the Christmas tree. BTC shot up to 28,400 US dollars in the course of its Christmas rally on 27 December – then bears got a bit too excited and the price corrected slightly. At the time of going to press, Bitcoin is trading just below the 27,000 US dollar mark – so the “30k” is still within reach.

At the same time, the Bitcoin price still seems undervalued despite new record highs. At least if one uses the stock-to-flow model as a yardstick. As a chart from the crypto-analysis firm Ethereum Code suggests, Bitcoin is still trading below the price level predicted by the ultra-bullish model of the Dutch Bitcoin analyst PlanB.

The stock-to-flow deflection is currently 0.70. A value of 1 means that BTC is overvalued according to the S2F model and vice versa.

Bitcoin: Bigger than VISA

The enormous price gains – BTC has increased by 55.6 percent over the month – have meant that Bitcoin’s market capitalisation has grown to over 500 billion US dollars. This means that the capitalisation of the cryptocurrency number exceeds that of giants such as Walmart (406 billion USD), Samsung (469 billion USD) or VISA (487 billion USD). If Bitcoin can maintain the momentum of the holiday rally, its market capitalisation will soon walk on par with Tesla (USD 627 billion).

Ethereum picks up

While Bitcoin corrects slightly, Ether hodlers can enjoy a lagging ETH rally. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation has gained almost 15 per cent on the day and is now trading above the USD 700 mark. ETH is thus well on its way to putting a fitting end to its extremely successful year from a price perspective. The Ether price has increased more than fivefold since the beginning of the year. The native asset of the Ethereum smart contract platform not only benefited from the rapid developments in the field of decentralised finance (DeFi). The long-awaited upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 also reached an important milestone with the launch of the Beacon Chain at the beginning of December. The possibility of staking Ether (ETH2) means an additional incentive for investors who want to engage in the proof-of-stake experiment and earn a passive crypto income.