The trillion-dollar market value park has a new kid: Bitcoin. On Friday, Bitcoin’s market value crossed the $1 trillion mark for the first time in its history. Bitcoin last night became the first virtual currency in the world to hit the global market value of $1 trillion after it crossed the $53,684 level. This surge puts the most famous cryptocurrency at an enviable position among other assets as its returns outperform the returns of traditional assets like stocks and gold.
According to Sumit Gupta, CEO of CoinDCX, the bullish run of bitcoin may continue and it wouldn’t be a big surprise if it crosses the $1,00,000 mark. “If bitcoin continues its current run, it won’t come as a surprise if it crosses the $100,000 mark sooner than later. There is tremendous interest in digital assets, which we are seeing almost every day in the space, both in retail and institutional,” said Sumit. He also spoke about the second biggest cryptocurrency Ethereum and said, “Ethereum is breaking records and is currently at an all-time high. The digital asset that has grown over 120% year-to-date, and may touch $30,00 very soon.”
Prices of bitcoin have quadrupled over the course of the last 12 months and it has seen exponential growth in the last two months as it grew from $25,000 in December to $50,000 in February. To give this a context, only a handful of companies have a value greater than bitcoin today. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (owner of Google) have a market cap more than bitcoin. As of today, the market cap of Apple is more than $2 trillion. The market value of bitcoin is calculated by the price of bitcoin by the number of bitcoins created.
The surge in bitcoin’s price also came after the news of electric-vehicle car manufacturer Tesla announced earlier this month that it has invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin. Additionally, Tesla also announced that it is entertaining the idea of accepting bitcoin is a payment for its SUV and cars. As of now, bitcoin is $225 billion more than the Musk-owned Tesla.
Even the price of the joke currency dogecoin (a currency that started with a shiba-inu based meme), has been skyrocketing this year thanks to affirmative tweets from Elon Musk who’s completely in support of cryptocurrencies of all kind.
Kaspersky Security: DDoS attacks falling due to rise in Bitcoin’s value
Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, online activity saw a sharp increase throughout 2020 with users conducting most of their activities at home online. As people were online for their work and leisure, DDoS attacks also surged with attacks on major educational institutions and online gaming services.
However, according to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, there were only 10% DDoS attacks in the fourth quarter of 2020 than in the fourth quarter of 2019. The researchers at Kaspersky believe that the reduction in DDoS attack is directly correlated to the surge in cryptocurrency values, with most cyber-criminals now turning their attention towards ‘cryptojacking’.
Kaspersky Security Network’s data shows that during 2019 and during the first half of 2020, the number of crypto miners detected by their infrastructure was less. However, starting August 2020, the numbers saw a sharp rise till December.
Alexey Kiselev, the Kaspersky DDoS Protection team’s Business Development Manager gave a statement regarding this and said, “The DDoS attack market is currently affected by two opposite trends. On the one hand, people still highly rely on stable work of online resources, which can make DDoS attacks a common choice for malefactors.”
What are DDoS attacks?
DDoS attacks are attacks that are carried by unethical hackers and cybercriminals where they target certain websites and applications by overloading them with more traffic than their servers can handle. Due to the increase in traffic, services are temporarily disrupted and makes the applications and website inaccessible for the most part. DDoS are one of the most used method of making profit where the cybercriminals use a smokescreen to infiltrate a website’s network and then initiate a malware attack.
