Bitcoin vs. NASDAQ 100: Watch them thrive during the pandemic

It’s now clear that the coronavirus pandemic made the world’s most powerful tech companies even stronger, but what if Bitcoin was a tech stock?

Apple and Microsoft retained their trillion-dollar market caps through the ups and downs of the greater stock market, and worldwide lockdowns even helped both Alphabet and Amazon secure access to the exclusive cuatro comma club for the very time time.

In fact, the NASDAQ 100 index — a popular benchmark that tracks the market performance of the US’ largest tech companies — is actually positive for the year; it’s up more than 6% while the broader S&P 500 index is down by a similar amount.

We wondered: how did Bitcoin compare to top-tier companies like Intel, PayPal, or Tesla as COVID-19 swept across the world? To help visualise this, Hard Fork built the bar chart race below.

It maps 2020’s major events against the waxing and waning of the NASDAQ 100, and shows a running total of the NASDAQ 100’s collective market cap (in billions.)

Toggle the filter to sort market caps from lowest to highest to experience the COVID-19 crisis from the perspective of mid-cap stocks like Starbucks and Costco. To help keep the data focused, we’ve chosen to only show you those companies with market caps over $100 billion.

Keep an eye out for Netflix: just after the WHO labeled the COVID-19 situation a pandemic, plucky traders boosted it from the middle of the charts to eclipse the likes of Adobe, PepsiCo, and Comcast in a matter of weeks.

(NB: If the visualisation doesn’t show, try loading this page in your browser’s “Desktop Mode.”)

Bitcoin would class in the NASDAQ 100’s top 16 stocks

As for BTC: you’ll see that if Bitcoin were a legitimate company, it would’ve thrived alongside tech’s finest. Its overall market cap places it squarely between Elon Musk’s two corporate babies, PayPal and Tesla.

[Read: A look at the $17 billion stock portfolio of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]

Of course, the irony is that serious traders would deem BTC almost entirely worthless if it were a legal entity required to submit documents to the SEC.

Still, we’ll forever have this bar chart.