The world’s leading cryptocurrency, bitcoin, has marked an important milestone today with regard to market valuation. The total market capitalization of all bitcoins in existence is now over $7 billion again, a benchmark not seen since August 2014. For comparison, the market capitalization of online money transfers firm Paypal (NASDAQ:PYPL) is about $49 billion, or just seven times that of the bitcoin network.

Fueling the rise in market cap is the fact that bitcoin’s price has been on a rally recently, with the BTC/USD exchange rate today reaching $453.50. Exactly a month ago March 24th, 2016 the price was as low as $413.50 so the figure represents a jump of about $40 or 9.7% month over month.

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Yearly comparisons are not always relevant for an asset as volatile as Bitcoin but it should be noted in this case for its long term growth. The leading cryptocurrency has roughly doubled in value as on April 24th, 2015 the BTC/USD exchange rate was just around $230 and the total market cap of Bitcoin was just $3.3 billion.

The overall market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies combined is now almost $8.5 billion, with Ethereum at $652 million, Ripple at $254 million, Litecoin at $156 million, Dash at $41 million and the many others making up the remaining $400 million.