Bitcoin price hits $100,000 for the first time

The price of one bitcoin hit $100,000 for the first time on Wednesday, as demand for the digital currency continued to surge in the wake of an election that saw victories for crypto-friendly candidates led by President-elect Donald Trump.

Since Nov. 5, the price of bitcoin has surged more than 45%. Year to date, prices have more than doubled.

The six-figure mark is the latest lucrative milestone for a digital currency that emerged 15 years ago from a brief white paper written by a still-unknown author. The ideas that author, known as Satoshi Nakamoto, spelled out have since spawned an entire technological landscape dedicated to peer-to-peer transactions that now includes hundreds of other digital tokens as well as NFTs and trading platforms.

But cryptocurrencies have remained controversial: Many of them, including bitcoin itself, have helped fuel a rise in cybercrimes and scams that the FBI says were responsible for billions of dollars in consumer losses last year.

That’s prompted current federal regulators to take a skeptical view of many cryptocurrency efforts.

In the wake of the election, bitcoin advocates are hoping a new pro-crypto view will take hold in Washington that will put an end to strict regulation of and enforcement against digital tokens, while opening up bitcoin investing to traditional financial institutions and making it more profitable to mine bitcoin by increasing energy production.

Trump, once a crypto-skeptic, has expressed interest in creating a U.S. bitcoin “strategic reserve” modeled on those for gold and oil. During his third presidential run, he appeared at this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, to praise the crypto community for its innovation while vowing to make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world if elected.

Bitcoin’s price movements remain notoriously volatile, and that is unlikely to change no matter who is in office, experts say.

Yet the upward price-growth over time is undeniable. More recently, a large share of demand fueling that growth has been funneled into exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that track the price of bitcoin and are operated by major financial institutions, with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF being the largest.

In an interview, Jay Jacobs, BlackRock’s U.S. head of thematic and active ETFs, said that since launching in January, the IBIT ETF has grown to a value of more than $45 billion — and that just in the past month, it’s seen its value increase by $4.1 billion.

In addition to the electoral success of candidates friendlier to crypto, Jacobs said greater numbers of investors across the wealth spectrum — and throughout the world — are coming to view bitcoin as a hedge against geopolitical risks, especially currency devaluations sparked by inflation.

With ETFs serving as an easy-to-use way for investors to gain exposure to bitcoin’s price movements, it’s only a matter of time before mainstream interest in the cryptocurrency reaches a tipping point, Jacobs said.

“There’s growing interest across institutional or wealth-management space to learn, but it’s always going to be a journey of education, and it takes time for that process for happen,” he said.