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Bitcoin (BTC) pushed higher on Friday to a new all-time-high price, stopping just shy of $53,000. At the current level of outstanding bitcoin supplies, a move above $53,665 would push the largest cryptocurrencys market capitalization to the $1 trillion mark,seen as a milestone in bitcoins maturation as a global asset.

Signs continued to mount that bitcoin is seeing increased mainstream adoption or at least mainstream attention from the likes of the giant bank JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the bond-investing legend Jeff Gundlach. (See Bitcoin Watch, below.)

But bitcoin perhaps wasnt even be the biggest story this week in digital-asset markets. Binance coin (BNB), the in-house in-house token from the similarly named cryptocurrency exchange, has soared this month to a $40 billion market capitalization, ranking it third among all digital assets behind bitcoin and Ethereums ether (ETH).

Related: Bitcoin's Rise Should Make Regulators Ask if the Fed's Policies Have a Hand in It: WaPo

In traditional markets, European shares rose and U.S. stock futures pointed to a higher open. Gold slid 0.2% to $1,772 an ounce.

PAY YOUR SWISS TAXES IN BTC: The Swiss canton of Zug dubbed Crypto Valley thanks to the many digital-asset companies drawn to the jurisdiction because of its friendly blockchain and crypto regulation has started accepting tax payments in cryptocurrency. For now, theres a cap of 100,000 Swiss francs ($111,300). As the home of the Crypto Valley, it is important to us to further promote and simplify the use of cryptocurrencies in everyday life, said Zugs finance director, Heinz Tannler, when the tax initiative was announced.

BIDDERS UP: Christies, the 255-year-old auction house of art, antiques and apparently meterorites, will now accept cryptocurrency for payment, Bloomberg reported. That Christies is willing to accept cryptocurrency for the first time, according to the piece, says more about the auction houses attempt to break into new audiences than it does about a shift in the traditional art market.

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Bitcoin beating gold where it counts right now on the inflation trade

Related: Morocco Considers Launching a Central Bank Digital Currency

Bitcoin continues to outshine gold amid calls for more fiscal spending to boost the U.S. economy back to full strength.

The worlds biggest cryptocurrency set a new record price of $52,954.49 on Friday, CoinDesks Omkar Godbole reported, having scaled the $50,000 mark two days prior. Meanwhile, gold fell to $1,760 early Friday to hit the lowest level since July.

Bitcoins potential use as a hedge against inflation, and possibly a better one than gold, has become a key narrative on Wall Street as well as in Washington.

In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, U.S. Treasury SecretaryJanet Yellen said that the proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package could help the U.S. get back to full employment in a year, a sign that President Joe Bidens administration is undaunted in pushing for a large bill. She added that the risk associated with delivering too little stimulus is greater than the price of doing something big.

But she added that bitcoin is a highly speculative asset.

Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO of the $130 billion DoubleLine Capital and one of the worlds most renowned bond investors, tweeted Thursday that he was a long-term dollar bear and that bitcoin was maybe the Stimulus Asset and that it doesnt look like gold is. Gundlach previously had said he didnt believe in bitcoin.

Lots of liquid poured into a funnel creates a torrent, Gundlach wrote in the tweet.

Analysts for JPMorgan wrote in an 86-page reportthat bitcoins competition with gold as an alternative currency is here to stay, though they called it an economic sideshow in that the rise of digital finance is the real post-Covid-19 story.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft-founder-turned-philanthropist, said hes neutral, notable perhaps because he didnt immediately pan it, as some other successful U.S. business people have done, later to miss out on big market gains. (Looking at you, Warren Buffett.)

The past couple of weeks have seen fundamental arguments made for choosing silver, bitcoin, and Treasuries over gold, wroteEdward Moya, senior market analyst for the foreign-exchange broker OANDA. Bitcoin has benefited from relentless retail demand and on expectations that institutional interest is still growing.

Binance coin shoots to $40B valuation, trailing only bitcoin and ether

While cryptocurrency exchange Coinbases valuation soars to a $77 billion valuation based on private-share trading, rival Binance is seeing rocketing demand for its exchange tokens in digital-asset markets.

Prices for the BNB tokens have jumped five-foldthis month, for a market value of about $40 billion. According to Messari, that valuation makes Binance coin the third-biggest digital asset after bitcoin and Ethereums ether.

The token serves as Binances internal currency: It can be used to buy cryptocurrencies on the exchange and pay fees. So the jump in BNBs price might reflect speculation that Binance, already one of the worlds biggest cryptocurrency exchanges by trading volume, will occupy a dominant role in the future of fast-growing digital-asset markets.

According to CoinDesks Sebastian Sinclair, the price rise might be tied to increased interest in a decentralized financial application called PancakeSwap, which helps users find yield-earning opportunities in crypto markets. PancakeSwap runs on Binances own blockchain, Binance Smart Chain.

Daily volumes on PancakeSwap have shot up to more than $1 billion, from $37 million at the start of the year, CoinDesks Will Foxley reported.

The BNB token is needed to process transactions on the Binance Smart Chain, similar to the way ether is used on the Ethereum blockchain.

For what its worth, the BNB token itself is set atop the Ethereum blockchain, under the common ERC-20 standard for digital tokens.

That helps explain why a tokenized or synthetic version of the BNB token, called wrapped BNB (WBNB), appears to be the primary token traded on PancakeSwap within the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem, according to CoinGecko, a crypto-markets tracking site:

DEFI AT $400 BILLION? Bloq founder Matthew Roszak told CoinDesk TV that the growing arena of decentralized finance, or DeFi, where total collateral now sits at $40 billion, could add another zero in a year from today.

TULIPMANIA 2.0? While bubbles of the past explode only to later collapse and never to return to their previous glory, bitcoin is known for its two-steps-forward-one-step-back moves, Joakim Book, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, writes in op-ed for CoinDesk Opinion.

WHAT IS A BITCOIN ETF, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? CoinDesks Ollie Leach explains.

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First Mover: Bitcoin Meets Torrent as Lowly Binance Coin Gets $40B Valuation - Yahoo Finance