Market News

By Michael P. Regan and Emily Nicolle

(Bloomberg) -- On Wednesday night in New York, the dreams of crypto’s permabulls became reality: Bitcoin hit $100,000.

A monthlong rally has seen the largest and oldest cryptocurrency alternately approach — and then repeatedly shy away from — that most sought-after of round numbers.

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Spurring the moves: the digital-asset industry’s chest-thumping optimism that US President-elect Donald Trump would halt the tough government scrutiny that prevailed during his predecessor’s administration and instead pursue policies and regulators friendly to the digital-asset industry. 

Events on Wednesday provided concrete support for that enthusiasm, with Trump’s nomination of the pro-crypto Paul Atkins to replace Gary Gensler at the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Paul Atkins was made for this job,” Robinhood Markets Inc. legal chief Dan Gallagher said earlier on Wednesday at the firm’s investor day in New York. 

Gallagher, who in November publicly withdrew from consideration for the SEC job, said he expected Atkins to address the industry bugbear of regulation by enforcement. “I think he’ll do that on day one,” Gallagher added.

A price of $100,000 pushes the market value of Bitcoin to just shy of $2 trillion and makes it a larger investment asset than all but a handful of public companies such as Nvidia Corp., Apple Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. And $2 trillion represents an amount bigger than the government bond markets of nations like Spain and Brazil, and one approaching the market capitalization of the entire FTSE 100 Index of British stocks. 

“Bitcoin reaching $100,000 signals the next phase of the bull run, one that now appears resilient to anything but exogenous shocks,” said Fadi Aboualfa, head of research at crypto custodian Copper Technologies Ltd.

Magnetic Target

Even before Trump was elected president, many crypto-minded investors believed a $100,000 price was inevitable. Hedge-fund manager Anthony Scaramucci predicted in September that it would reach that milestone by the end of this year, and billionaire Michael Novogratz said as much in June. Strategists at banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs made calls almost four years ago predicting it would eventually reach the six-figure milestone. 

Born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis 16 years ago, Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto as a peer-to-peer network free of government control. Whether Nakamoto is a single person or a group has been subject of much speculation throughout Bitcoin’s lifetime. 

It took a 135% year-to-date rally for Bitcoin to reach $100,000, yet the original digital asset is no stranger to such eye-popping price movements. The token, which ended the year 2010 at roughly 30 cents, rallied 157% last year after crashing 64% in 2022. It notched gains of 1,375% in 2017, 5,428% in 2013 and 1,317% in 2011.  

Its march from mere pennies in its early years to $100,000 today required scaling a massive wall of worry — or what crypto traders refer to as “FUD,” short for fear, uncertainty and doubt. The crypto asset class it ushered in has for years been a playground for scammers and ransomware artists, money launderers and hackers.

FTX Collapse

Bitcoin’s jump to an earlier record above $73,000 in March of this year marked a complete recovery from one of the most dramatic periods in its history: An almost 80% plunge from November 2021 to November 2022. That bear market period saw a cascading series of failures — including the collapse of the FTX exchange, as well as crypto lenders Genesis and Celsius. The government crackdown that ensued put FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in prison for 25 years on fraud charges, and landed his rival Changpeng Zhao, founder of the Binance exchange, a four-month sentence for failing to implement proper anti-money laundering controls.

Despite the sordid history of the crypto market, Bitcoin has continued to gain more and more acceptance in the mainstream financial system. And the larger the cryptocurrency grows and the more mainstream it gets, the closer the volatile asset gets to becoming systemically important to the global financial system. 

Prior to Trump’s election, Bitcoin’s price gains this year were fueled by the popularity of exchange-traded funds that invest directly in the token after they launched in January following a long legal fight between one of the fund’s issuers and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. 

Led by Wall Street heavyweights like BlackRock Inc. and Fidelity and the crypto-native Grayscale Investments, the ETFs now hold about $100 billion in assets, or roughly 5% of all the Bitcoin in circulation.

‘Supply Squeeze’

“The demand backdrop is solid,” said Manuel Villegas, digital assets analyst at Julius Baer. “It is not too far-fetched to believe that we might see a renewed chapter of the supply squeeze next year – the same factor that led us to believe last year that prices could only go one way when demand was growing at a multiple of supply.”

Trump’s return to the White House will potentially usher another big whale into the Bitcoin market: The US government itself. Speaking at a Bitcoin conference in July, Trump vowed to create a strategic stockpile of the cryptocurrency, starting with assets seized by the US government. 

At the same conference, Trump allies Robert Kennedy Jr. and Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis floated the idea of the government buying 1 million Bitcoin — or $100 billion worth at current prices — as a way to back the US dollar. 

--With assistance from Paige Smith.

(Updates with Paul Atkins nomination in fourth paragraph and Bitcoin chart)