The cryptocurrency Bitcoin has reached a $5,000 milestone, according to CoinDesk's price index.
The record high helped push the total value of publicly traded cryptocurrencies - including Ethereum and the Bitcoin-fork Bitcoin Cash - to more than $176 billion in valuation.
Bitcoin's value has increased rapidly since the start of the year, when one Bitcoin traded for less than $1,000. After most of its developers and miners that authorized transactions contributed their computing power, Bitcoin's technology can handle a lot more transaction per minute.
The Bitcoin ecosystem continues to attract significant investment. It's reported that Sequoia Capital and IDG Capital were putting money into China's Bitmain Technologies, which makes equipment for Bitcoin miners and conducts its own mining of the cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin miners are the essential part for the data-processing operations that race one another to verify parts of the Bitcoin blockchain, which is the currency's distributed ledger of transactions.
Since the $80 billion cryptocurrency market is about a 25th of 1 percent of the $200 trillion in gold, cash, stocks and bonds, digital currencies will need to increase by 25 times in order to reach 1 percent of the overall capital market.
If cryptocurrencies become part of asset allocation models, and are able to take 2 to 4 percent of capital markets, then the digital currencies will likely increase 100 times in value.
After Bitcoin stayed above the $5,000 level for 10 minutes, the price quickly dipped, falling over the next hour to a low of of $4,867.18 at 03:28 UTC. At one point, the price has even dipped to below $4,400 in value, representing a drop of around 12 percent.
Market data pointed to Chinese bitcoin exchange OKCoin leading the spike, with that market hitting a high of $5,149.
Previously, Bitcoin's milestone was at $4,000 in August 2017.