Bitcoin
BTC
Ethereum
ETH
Bitcoin vs Ethereum
Last 7 days, both indexed to zero
Each line starts at zero seven days ago and shows the percentage move since, so the two are on the same scale regardless of what one coin costs. Seven days is a week, not a trend.
| BTC | ETH | |
|---|---|---|
| Price A higher price per coin is not a bigger asset — it is the same value cut into fewer pieces. | $63,490.00 | $1,862.61 |
| Market cap Price multiplied by circulating supply. The closest thing to "how big is this". | $1.27T (larger) | $224.78B |
| Rank by market cap | #1 (larger) | #2 |
| Change, 24h | ▼0.40% | ▼0.30% |
| Change, 7 days | ▼0.70% | ▼0.40% |
| 24h volume How much actually changed hands. Thin volume against a large market cap means the price is easier to move than the cap suggests. | $19.82B (larger) | $6.58B |
| Daily turnover Volume as a share of market cap — how much of the asset trades in a day. | 1.56% | 2.93% (larger) |
| Circulating supply | 20,068,818 BTC | 120,682,036 ETH (larger) |
| Supply cap A hard cap and an uncapped supply are different designs, not a better and a worse one — what matters is whether issuance is predictable. | 21,000,000 max | No fixed cap |
| Below all-time high How far each sits under its own record price. It says where the price has been, not where it is going. | ▼49.64% | ▼62.34% |
| All-time high | $126,080.00 Oct 2025 | $4,946.05 Aug 2025 |
A highlighted figure is simply the larger of the two. It is marked on size, liquidity and supply — where bigger is a fact — and deliberately not on price or on percentage change, where "bigger" would be us implying a winner.
How Bitcoin and Ethereum actually differ
These are not two versions of the same idea. Bitcoin is a settlement network for one asset, deliberately kept simple so that the rules are hard to change and the ledger is cheap to verify. Ethereum is a general-purpose computer that happens to have a currency attached, and most of what people mean by "crypto" — stablecoins, lending, exchanges that run as code — is built on it rather than on Bitcoin.
The mechanical split is how each network agrees on its ledger. Bitcoin uses proof of work: miners spend electricity competing to add blocks, which is what makes rewriting history expensive. Ethereum switched to proof of stake in 2022, where validators post ETH as collateral and lose it for misbehaving. That cut Ethereum's energy use by well over 99% and introduced a different trade-off — security now rests on capital that can be concentrated, and a large share of staked ETH sits with a handful of staking services.
Supply works differently too. Bitcoin's 21 million cap is fixed in the software. Ethereum has no cap, but fees are partly burned, so issuance can run negative when the network is busy and positive when it is quiet.
The honest costs. Bitcoin settles slowly, cannot run applications without additional layers, and its security budget shrinks with each halving. Ethereum is more complex in every direction: fees spike when it is busy, activity has largely moved to layer-2 rollups that fragment the user experience, and smart contracts fail in ways a simple ledger cannot — billions have been lost to contract bugs. You are choosing between conservative and expressive, not between old and new.
What each one is
Bitcoin
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency launched in 2009 by a person or group writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It runs on a public network of computers that agree on a shared ledger, so a payment can settle without a bank, a payment processor, or a government sitting in the middle.
Ethereum
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain launched in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin and a group of co-founders. Where Bitcoin tracks who owns what, Ethereum runs code: smart contracts that execute exactly as written, which is what most stablecoins, lending protocols and NFTs are actually built on.
Where each one lives
Bitcoin
Native asset. BTC has no token contract — it is the asset of its own chain, not a token issued on someone else's.
Ethereum
Native asset. ETH has no token contract — it is the asset of its own chain, not a token issued on someone else's.
Whichever you hold, holding it yourself is the same problem
Both of these can sit on an exchange, and on an exchange neither of them is yours in the way people assume. If you decide to hold either one properly, this is the category that does it — devices that keep the keys off any internet-connected machine.
All hardware wallets we list → Some listings earn us a commission. That buys position on a list and nothing else — our rules, in writing.
We do not know your position, your timeframe or your tolerance for losing money, and any page that claims to answer this question without knowing those things is selling something. What we can do is make sure the facts above are current and that nothing on this page was paid for. Both of these assets can fall a long way.
Other comparisons
Figures for Bitcoin and Ethereum synced 84s ago from CoinGecko and shown in USD. This page is market information and education, not financial advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation to buy or sell BTC or ETH. Both can lose value.