Bitcoin (BTC) shot past $50,000 for the first time Tuesday to a new all-time high price.

The gain took the year-to-date return to about 70%, and traders immediately began to discuss what comes next. 

In traditional markets, U.S. stock futures pointed toward a higher open. "The reflation trade is powering assets tied to economic growth and price pressure, including commodities and cyclical stocks," Bloomberg News reported. "At the same time, investors are riding a wave of speculative euphoria from penny stocks to bitcoin amid abundant policy support."

CRYPTO CRUSH: Signs continued to mount of greater mainstream acceptance of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

VERGE SNAFU: Verge, a small cryptocurrency serving as a payments option on Pornhub, suffered a massive 560,000-block reorganization Monday, according to researchers at Coin Metrics.

Nouveau riche emerge as crypto market cap tops $1.5 trillion

The market value of all cryptocurrencies has topped $1.5 trillion for the first time, and it's interesting to note just how much of that growth has been fueled by speculation over which projects might be the most promising, rather than just the pumping of also-ran tokens that dominated the industry's top ranks in recent years. 

Sure, the industry leaders bitcoin and Etherum's ether still dominate the charts, representing roughly $1.1 trillion of the total. But the top 10 tokens now include cardano (ADA), polkadot (DOT), Binance coin (BNB) and chainlink (LINK) – all associated with projects perceived as having at least some claim on helping to create the future of finance.

They're crypto's nouveau riche, climbing in the industry hierarchy at the expense of XRP (XRP), litecoin (LTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH), which held sway until recently but apparently have failed to inspire traders to the same degree. 

Some companies in the growing arena of decentralized finance (DeFi), a subsector of the crypto industry where entrepreneurs are using blockchain technology to design automated versions of lenders and trading platforms, are raising money through token sales the way a Silicon Valley startup might sell an equity interest to a venture-capital fund.

In fact, Synthetix, a decentralized trading project, has just raised $12 million from investors Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm and IOSG – apparently through a sale of the project's associated SNX tokens. "The raise looks to be a rare occurrence of VCs investing through the purchase of a platform’s native token directly from its treasury rather than wiring funds to its founders," CoinDesk's Daniel Kuhn wrote Sunday. The SNX tokens have tripled in price this year to a market value of about $2.9 billion. 

"Individually, none of these may make sense, and no one can really predict who actually will win," John Wu, president of Ava Labs, said in an interview. His company backs the Avalanche blockchain, whose native AVAX cryptocurrency is up roughly 10-fold this year to a market value of $3 billion. And that's after the revelation of a programming bug last week triggered a quick price correction.

"This is very similar to tech investing where people are paying for the future," Wu said. 

Ether (ETH):

Dogecoin (DOGE): 

Avalanche (AVAX):

STIMULUS BITCOIN WINNINGS: Americans who bought bitcoin with first $1,200 U.S. government stimulus check are up 639%.

BLOCKCHAIN POWER USAGE BETWEEN ROMANIA'S AND POLAND'S: Bitcoin and six other proof-of-work blockchains use between 55.1 terawatt-hours of electricity per year (roughly the energy footprint of Romania) and 180.1 terawatt-hours (Poland or Thailand), argues Tim Swanson, founder of Post Oak Labs and head of market intelligence at Clearmatics, in paper published Sunday. 

MOHAMED EL-ERIAN SEES GROWING "OFFICIAL" RISK: "The private sector is embracing more and more bitcoins as both a form of payment and as away to invest," the Allianz chief economist told CNN's Julia Chatterley in an interview. "The official sector is warning more about bitcoin. The real accident here is that the official sector says, enough is enough."