Realized Market Cap for Bitcoin Reaches Record Levels

The price of Bitcoin trading has been somewhat unstable over the past few weeks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the asset is on a dry streak. Now, it has been able to record another significant milestone. 

According to statistics from data aggregator Coinmetrics.io, August 25 marked the very first time that the realized market capitalization for Bitcoin crossed the $10 billion mark. Essentially, the recognized market capitalization is a figure gotten by multiplying the price that Bitcoin last traded by the size of each trade. The index crossed to reach new record highs yesterday, thus becoming the latest indicator that Bitcoin might be ready to start on its bullish run.

The achievement is the latest in a string of record numbers for Bitcoin, an asset which recently also saw record numbers in indexes such as daily trading volumes across cryptocurrency exchanges and mining hash rate.

Speaking on what could have caused this bullish trend, Nick Szabo, the popular pioneer of cryptography, stated that the increased realized market cap is coming at a time when volatility on the Bitcoin network is very low. In a comment posted on his Twitter account earlier today, Szabo said, “The long-term chart reflects the superior deep safety, global seamlessness, and monetary soundness of Bitcoin.” 

The increase in this index is yet another underscore of Bitcoins dominance in the crypto market. Early last month, researchers at intelligence and analysis firm Arcane Research revealed that while mainstream data showed Bitcoin to be at a 70 percent dominance over other crypto assets, the figure could be even higher. 

In a report compiled by Forbes, research by the company argued that a more accurate measure of Bitcoin’s dominance could be gotten by factoring liquidity.  “One might be able to sell one token for 3 dollars, but what happens if you want to sell 1 million? Without accounting for liquidity, market capitalization becomes a meaningless measure,” they wrote.

The researchers ran two analyses; one based on data from market aggregator CoinMarketCap, while the other was limited to just ten crypto exchanges which had been identified by Bitwise Asset Management as being insusceptible to manipulating their trading volume numbers. 

To get to this conclusion, Arcane Research reportedly used the assets’ trading volume as an indicator of liquidity, although they argued that it is possible to get a more accurate measure for more detailed results. The firm used this index to recalculate the volume-weighted market capitalization of the entire crypto market. 

In its findings, the firm revealed that Bitcoin held a staggering 90 percent of the entire crypto market. At the same time, however, it would seem that altcoins aren’t doing as great as the world’s premier cryptocurrency. As Coinmetrics sowed, most of the popular tokens took a dip against Bitcoin in 2019, even on the back of comparatively better performances. 

The aggregator showed that the worst performers were ZCash, Bitcoin Cash, Stellar, and Ether, while Binance Coin took the crown of the best performer, with a 44 percent gain in value against Bitcoin since August 2018.