COVID-19 Cause World’s Largest Banks To Lose 3x BTC’s Market Cap

The 14 largest banks the world has to offer managed to lose a collective $635.33 billion in market capitalization since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Crunching the numbers some, this is more than three times Bitcoin (BTC)’s the current market cap and is shy of double the market cap of all cryptocurrencies in existence.

Losing A Lot Of Ground While BTC Gains

The starting point for this debacle stands on the 19th of December, 2019. Back then, Bitcoin’s total market cap stood at $130 billion. Six of these banks had a market cap higher than that of Bitcoin before the global recession caused by the pandemic crashed into the world. When the dust finally settled, only Bank of America and JPMorgan have managed to keep their head above the BTC market cap. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China technically didn’t surpass Bitcoin’s market cap, but it is in a tie with the cryptocurrency at this point in time.

There are some key things to consider when viewing this information, however. Bitcoin, while halving itself in value back in March during the dreaded “Black Thursday,” has actually managed to gain 48% more in market cap, or $62 billion. At the same time, every single bank listed had shed billions of dollars in market cap off their value.

Massive Losses Across The Board

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit a large array of banks, and it’s hit them hard. Of the listed major banks, Wells Fargo managed to lose more than half of its market cap, going down 56.26% and losing $128 billion in the process.  In terms of percentage, Santander wasn’t far behind, while losing a (relatively) smaller amount of market cap, $31.76 billion, the bank had lost 46.16% of its total market cap in the process.

The largest pension fund the world has to offer, GPIF, suffered immensely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, managing to lose an equivalent of Bitcoin’s entire market cap within a single quarter. As this chaos has been going on, Bitcoin has been gaining unprecedented ground in terms of traditional investor adoption. This is easily reflected by the Growth of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust: A publicly-traded company that has gone as far as to make Bitcoin its reserve currency.

A New Era Of Finance

While the idea of major banks just disappearing any time soon is downright laughable, it seems that these major banks are starting to struggle with the world’s ongoing innovation when it comes to money and how it truly is. This, in turn, redefines their value proposition. Further negative factors contributing to the dire straights hitting major banks, is the recent stimuli sent out from the world’s various central banks, going in multi-trillions of USD being printed.