Bitcoin’s price has surged past the $100,000 mark for the first time in its history, fueled by institutional demand, corporate accumulation and heightened expectations of crypto-friendly policies under Donald Trump’s presidency.
Now ahead about 130% year-to-date, bitcoin’s market capitalization has risen to just shy of $2 trillion only 15 years after coming into existence. For reference, Nvidia and Apple sport market caps of about $3.5 trillion, Microsoft $3 trillion, and Google and Amazon $2.2 trillion. The market capitalization of all the gold in the world is roughly $17.7 trillion.
At the forefront of this rally was the early-2024 launch of spot-based bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) by asset management giants including BlackRock and Fidelity. These products have been a resounding success, securing assets under management of around $30 billion in less than one year’s time.
Despite the success of the ETFs, the move higher in bitcoin seemingly stalled throughout a large chunk of this year, at least in part thanks to regulatory uncertainty surrounding the U.S. presidential election. The early November victory of crypto-friendly Donald Trump, though, spurred new legs for the rally, with bitcoin quickly taking out its March high above $73,500, then in fast time moving past $80,000, then $90,000, and finally $100,000 just minutes ago.
Read more: Crypto Foe and SEC Chair Gary Gensler Will Quit When Trump Takes Office
Another large part of the bull story is growing corporate adoption, led by MicroStrategy (MSTR) and its Executive Chairman Michael Saylor. The company — which began its bitcoin purchases in August 2020 — has continued to raise billions of dollars to deploy into bitcoin, taking its holdings to 386,700 tokens which are now worth more than $38 billion. Saylor and team have inspired other publicly traded companies, U.S.-listed Semler Scientific and Japan-listed Metaplanet among them, to pursue similar strategies. Even tech giant Microsoft has a proposal before its board as to whether it should pursue a bitcoin treasury strategy.
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