Bitcoin has grown to become one of the preferred investment options in recent times. Its popularity among investors can be credited to the returns the asset has brought in its decade of existence. It is one of the few assets that has consistently served as a hedge against inflation while bringing massive gains to its holders. Seeing these gains, more investors have wanted a bigger slice of the pie.
Up until 2009 though, bitcoin was not an investment option for anyone. Even then, it was still widely unknown to the general market. Stocks were at the forefront of investing minds at that point and investors had seen gains at various points.
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Some stocks have been incredibly profitable over this period of time too. An example of that has been Tesla stocks, its success shooting ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood into the limelight after her call on the stock had paid off. Let’s see how bitcoin has performed in comparison to the top-performing stocks on Wall Street.
Bitcoin Vs. Everyone Else
A lot of the assets traded in the financial market are far older than bitcoin. Still a preteen, the BTC market is still in its very early stages. Nevertheless, this has not stopped the growth of the asset, making it a top contender in financial markets. Comparing the top stocks and markets to BTC shows a glaring disparity in how much better the digital asset has performed compared to the others.
BTC price trading above $63K | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
In the last decade, bitcoin has returned over 3,000,000% positive gains on its investments, according to this report from Watcher Guru. A single BTC cost as low as $0.0008 when it was initially released in 2009. Over the years, the asset has grown so much, hitting an all-time high of almost $67,000 in October.
In comparison, top-performing stocks show unimpressive returns. Tesla has been one of the best-performing stocks of the last decade, but even the automobile manufacturer’s gains do not come close to BTC’s returns. Tesla has returned 22,520%, Nvidia has returned 8,435%, and gold has seen a disappointing negative 14% return in the past 10 years.
Catching Up On Market Cap
Another interesting metric of comparison is the market cap of the top assets in the financial industry. BTC does not top this list as it does in terms of returns. However, the age difference of all of the assets on this list paints an interesting future for both the past and the future of the assets in this category.
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Bitcoin, despite being only 12 years old at this point, has beat out well-known and long-running asset classes in terms of market cap. For one, BTC’s market cap is almost as large as that of Tesla. It also beats out the market cap of Facebook and Nvidia, both older than the digital asset in the market. Its $1.15 trillion market cap makes it a top contender in the financial markets
An interesting entrant in this list is Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Ethereum which is only five years old boasts a market cap of $533 billion. This figure makes it a more valuable asset than big names like JPMorgan Chase, Visa, and Alibaba.
Featured image from Forbes, chart from TradingView.com