Bitcoin Strikes $103,000 For First Time Ever

Olumide Adesina•Thursday, December 5, 2024•2 min read

Bitcoin jumped above the long-awaited $102,000 benchmark early Thursday. Coinmarketcap data highlighted that the flagship cryptocurrency was last up more than 5% at $103,072.00. The move was made just hours after President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would call Paul Atkins the Securities and Exchange Commission’s chair.

The crypto community saw this as consistent with his pledge to not only replace Gary Gensler, who has become a villain in the industry due to the agency’s regulation-by-enforcement approach to the sector under his leadership but also create a more supportive regulatory environment for the crypto industry in general.

The same day, at the DealBook conference, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell described Bitcoin as “just like gold, only it’s virtual, it’s digital.”. “People are not using it as a store of value or as a form of payment,” he added, adding that “it’s not a competitor for the dollar, it’s a competitor for gold.”.

Bitcoin’s original concept was created during the height of the 2008 financial crisis: according to the Bitcoin Whitepaper, its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”.

However, in recent years, the industry has shown a large portion of the institutional investing community the value of Bitcoin. At the beginning of this year, BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco, and others introduced the first spot bitcoin ETFs, known as bitcoin’s “IPO” moment. The price has increased due to the increasing demand from institutions. The company is getting ready to start spot cryptocurrency trading, according to Rick Wurster, the incoming CEO of Charles Schwab, in November, pending regulatory changes anticipated under the incoming Trump administration.

The U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have seen net inflows of over $31 billion this year, and the fourth halving of Bitcoin in April has resulted in tighter supply. Increased corporate adoption of Bitcoin, spearheaded by Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy, growing speculation of a strategic Bitcoin national reserve, and Republican Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election have all contributed to the price increase of Bitcoin.

Trump recently nominated cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to succeed Gary Gensler as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. This move could eliminate several regulatory obstacles that have hindered the industry as a whole during the Biden administration.

Trump also appointed hedge fund manager Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnik, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, to lead the departments of Treasury and Commerce, respectively in an effort to assemble what may be the most pro-crypto cabinet to date

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Olumide Adesina

Financial Market Writer

Olumide Adesina is a French-born Nigerian financial writer. He tracks, analyzes, and reports changes in financial markets with over 15 years of working experience in investment trading.