Investment Into Bitcoin By Companies

Those who invested in Bitcoin throughout 2017 know that it is a year they will never forget. Cryptocurrencies, which are the tokens associated with blockchain, sit in an asset class that currently worth an astounding six hundred billion dollars. This surpassed the eighteen million dollar market cap, set at the beginning of 2017, by more than 3000%.

While many companies on Wall Street have been less than dismissive of the cryptocurrencies, some are still seeking to invest in the underlying technology of blockchain. For example, JP Morgan’s CEO has been outspoken in his disregard for Bitcoin, but the company itself still invests in blockchain.

Still, the largest two companies that currently invest in both cryptocurrency and blockchain are Overstock.com and Alphabet, owned by Google. In fact, Alphabet has poured millions of dollars into the technology, but holds back from investment in the cryptocurrency itself. The total investment into blockchain, adding everything invested back to 2012, currently hovers at just over one billion dollars.

Alphabet is looking more closely at the blockchain tech than the currency. In fact, its most notable investment in blockchain has been into a technology known as Ripple. This is used to settle bank transactions of an international sort, and uses about a two thirds of the operating costs and allows people to move their money in mere seconds.

They have made other investments in similar blockchain tech as well. Ledger X is a trading platform, Veem is a provider of payments made online and uses blockchain to settle their transactions, and Storj is a service for cloud storage that utilizes blockchain.

The CEO of Overstock, however, is one of the most heard-from supporters of Bitcoin, across the board. He has stated that Bitcoin is much more powerful than our own actual money. Overstock was also one of the first retail companies that conducted transactions based solely in Bitcoin. In fact, their overstock transactions are getting more hype than many of their operations online currently are.

Most recently, Overstock has furthered their plans for cybercurrency trading by launching an ICO specifically for tokens that would be used as the preferred money for trading on their site. In fact, they have put about $250 million into that project, currently.

However, due to the type of risky behavior associated with Google’s Alphabet and Overstock’s retails ventures, experts still say you might be better off investing in something else.