Bitcoin continues to soar, crosses $51,000 mark

New Delhi: Bitcoin prices on Wednesday continued to extend gains, a day after passing the $50,000 mark for the first time in four weeks. The world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was trading 5 per cent higher at around $51,614 at 11:30am.

According to CoinDesk, Ether, the coin linked to ethereum blockchain and the second largest crypto, was up 3 per cent to $3,500. Cardano prices gained marginally to $2.22 whereas dogecoin surged nearly 5 per cent to $0.24. Other digital tokens like Stellar, Litecoin gained Solana and Uniswap slipped over in the last 24 hours.

The global crypto market cap was up by more than 3 per cent to $2.22 trillion compared to Tuesday. However, the total crypto market volume jumped about 4 per cent to $110.80 billion.

The Bitcoin advance has overcome China’s ban on cryptocurrency transactions and turbulence around El Salvador’s troubled rollout of the digital coin as legal tender, reports Bloomberg.

"Now that Bitcoin has surpassed $50,000, we do expect this bull run to take it to near highs during the fourth quarter,” said Leah Wald, chief executive officer of Valkyrie Investments, a specialized alternative asset management firm, in a Bloomberg QuickTake video.

Bitcoin had fallen below the $50,000 mark in early September during a broad selloff. It's prices declined further in September, hitting a low of $40,596 on September 21.

Here are the top cryptocurrencies and their prices on Wednesday:

Bitcoin--$51,540

Ether--$3,494.17

3. Binance Coin - $433.01

4. Cardano - $2.20

5. Tether - $0.9999

6. XRP - $1.06

7. Solana - $157.16

8. Dogecoin: $0.2592

9. USD Coin $1.00

10. Polkadot - $30.98