Bitcoin tops $89,000
Bitcoin’s record-breaking rally took the digital asset past $89,000 and lifted the overall value of the crypto market above its pandemic-era peak as traders bet on a boom under President-elect Donald Trump, Bloomberg reported.
The largest token has jumped about 32% since the US election on Nov. 5, hitting an all-time high of $89,599 on Tuesday. The original cryptocurrency changed hands at $88,450 as of 5:45 a.m. in London.
Trump has vowed friendlier crypto rules and his Republican Party is tightening its grip on Congress, boosting his odds of pushing through his agenda. Trump’s other pledges include setting up a strategic Bitcoin stockpile and fostering domestic mining of the token to make the US the crypto capital of the planet.
His stance is a sharp break from a Securities & Exchange Commission crackdown on the divisive industry under President Joe Biden. The change of tone has energized speculative buying of large and small tokens alike, raising the value of digital assets overall to about $3.1 trillion, CoinGecko data show.
Investors are lining up bets in the options market that Bitcoin will pass $100,000 as soon as the end of the year, according to data from the Deribit exchange. Open interest — or outstanding contracts — for CME Group Inc. futures for Bitcoin and second-ranked Ether scaled records on Monday, a sign of growing engagement by US institutional investors.
Meanwhile, software firm MicroStrategy Inc. — the largest publicly-traded corporate holder of Bitcoin outside the exchange-traded fund sector — bought about 27,200 Bitcoin for some $2 billion between Oct. 31 and Nov. 10.