cryptocurrency prices
Cryptocurrency prices
The live Bitcoin price today is $103,593.96 as of 5/14/2025, with a 24-hour trading volume of $30,497,942,220. Bitcoin’s price is up 1.00% in the last 24 hours. Currently, Bitcoin ranks 1 out of 49429 coins according to CryptoMarketCap no deposit sign up bonus. Bitcoin has a live market cap of $2,057,841,840,347, a circulating supply of 19,864,496 BTC coins and a maximum supply of 21,000,000 BTC coins. Want to find the best place to buy Bitcoin at the current price? The top cryptocurrency exchanges for buying and selling Bitcoin coins are currently Binance, Gate.io, Coinbase, Bitget, BitMart. You can find other markets listed on our crypto exchanges page.
Bitcoin is used as a digital currency for peer-to-peer electronic transactions and traded for goods or services with vendors who accept Bitcoins as payment. In fact, Bitcoin spearheaded the cryptocurrency market, an ever-growing collection of digital assets that can be sent and received by anyone anywhere in the world without reliance on intermediaries.
It may be possible to buy Bitcoin instantly on centralized exchanges, because an exchange account isn’t really a wallet. Instead, it is an electronic reflection of fund balances that an exchange will display, even though the actual funds have not moved – the user is simply entitled to a small amount of the BTC held by the exchange.
What is cryptocurrency
In 1983, American cryptographer David Chaum conceived of a type of cryptographic electronic money called ecash. Later, in 1995, he implemented it through Digicash, an early form of cryptographic electronic payments. Digicash required user software in order to withdraw notes from a bank and designate specific encrypted keys before they could be sent to a recipient. This allowed the digital currency to be untraceable by a third party.
A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Most cryptocurrencies exist on decentralized networks using blockchain technology—a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers.
Japan’s Payment Services Act defines Bitcoin as legal property. Cryptocurrency exchanges operating in the country are required to collect information about the customer and details relating to the wire transfer.
Cryptocurrencies were introduced with the intent to revolutionize financial infrastructure. As with every revolution, however, there are tradeoffs involved. At the current stage of development for cryptocurrencies, there are many differences between the theoretical ideal of a decentralized system with cryptocurrencies and its practical implementation.
Cryptocurrencies are based on blockchain technology, making them very secure, although it’s still up to investors to choose trustworthy exchanges. Cryptographic techniques (the process of writing and deciphering code) are used to issue, verify, and secure transactions. Through public ledgers, transactions remain traceable and unable to be counterfeited. This peer-to-peer digital asset system makes it fast, easy, and inexpensive to send and receive payments worldwide. There’s no currency exchange needed, nor are there hefty fees. Transactions using these financial assets are publicly recorded, stored digitally, and transmitted via encryption, with detailed coding required for transmission and storage.
Cryptocurrency market
Cryptocurrency market capitalization (market cap) refers to the total value of a particular cryptocurrency that is currently in circulation. It is calculated by multiplying the current market price of a cryptocurrency by the total number of coins or tokens that have been issued. The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies for today is $3,565,181,735,202
A cryptocurrency’s market cap increases when its price per unit increases. Alternatively, an increase in circulating supply can also lead to an increase in market cap. However, an increase in supply also tends to lead to a lower price per unit, and the two cancel each other out to a large extent. In practice, an increase in price per unit is the main way in which a cryptocurrency’s market cap grows.
Cryptocurrency was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, which is the pseudonym used by the inventor of Bitcoin. Even though digital currency concepts existed before Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto was the first to create a peer-to-peer digital currency that reliably solved the issues facing previous digital money projects. Bitcoin was initially proposed in 2008 and launched in early 2009. Following the invention of Bitcoin, thousands of projects have attempted to imitate Bitcoin’s success or improve upon the original Bitcoin design by leveraging new technologies.
Generally, altcoins attempt to improve upon the basic design of Bitcoin by introducing technology that is absent from Bitcoin. This includes privacy technologies, different distributed ledger architectures and consensus mechanisms.