Bitcoin price breaks $50k, surpassing Facebook’s market value

BTC bounces back from crippling crash that wiped hundreds of billions from the crypto market

Bitcoin’s market cap surpassed Facebook’s value on 5 October, 2021 (Getty Images)

The price of bitcoin has passed $50,000 amid a remarkable recovery for the cryptocurrency.

The latest price surge has pushed bitcoin’s market capitalisation close to $1 trillion, overtaking Facebook’s market value.

Other leading cryptocurrencies have also experienced significant gains in recent days, with Ethereum (ether), Binance Coin, Solana (SOL), Ripple (XRP) and dogecoin all rising by between 15-30 per cent since the start of October.

Bitcoin still remains more than $10,000 away from its all-time high of $64,000, which it hit in mid-April 2021, though some analysts predict it could achieve new record price highs before the end of the year.

The latest price rally follows several months of volatility, spurred on by China’s decision to crack down on cryptocurrency in the country and the controversial $1 trillion infrastructure bill in the US that would require tax reporting on crypto assets.

“This kind of news usually causes a short-term pullback in the market but doesn’t really impact the fundamentals in the mid to long run,” Jonas Luethy, a sales trader at the UK-based digital asset broker GlobalBlock, told The Independent.

Bitcoin’s price rebound was boosted by an announcement from the Swiss financial regulator, which approved the first cryptocurrency investment fund of its kind in Switzerland.

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) said the fund would “facilitate serious innovation... in a consistently technology-neutral way.

Simon Peters, an analyst at the online trading platform eToro, said the move would open up the crypto market to a new section of high-volume investors.

“The new Crypto Market Index Fund will be open to ‘qualified investors’, enabling investment into cryptoassets with a ‘sufficiently large trading volume’,” he said.

“Considering Switzerland has one of the largest banking sectors in the world and accounts for an estimated 25 per cent of global cross border asset management, the chance for investors to gain additional exposure to cryptoassets could be exciting for the space.”