“Never sell your bitcoin.” This advice, given by Donald Trump to a jubilant audience at the July 27 Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, not only illustrates the Republican candidate for the White House and now US president-elect’s U-turn in favor of cryptocurrency, which he long criticized: In retrospect, it was sound investment advice.
On Thursday, November 21, bitcoin approached the symbolic $100,000 (€94,820) mark, having set one record after another since the US presidential election on November 5. Its rise exceeds 39% since the election and 100% since the start of 2024.
And the movement is not benefiting Bitcoin alone. Among the other major “cryptos,” Ether has jumped 30% since November 5, Solana 60%, and Dogecoin, created to parody cryptocurrency before rising to become one of the most important, has appreciated 130% in less than three weeks (just as Trump appointed the Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as head of “Department of Government Efficiency,” with the acronym “DOGE”).
This surge is taking place against a backdrop of rapidly growing volumes. A few days after the election, “We exceeded $400 billion traded per day, which is huge, and the overall capitalization of the crypto market exceeded $3,000 billion,” said Marion Labouré, an economist specializing in the sector at Deutsche Bank.
The market remains on the lookout for the slightest piece of information likely to justify the continuation of the rise – as in the Financial Times article, on Monday, November 18, according to which Trump Media & Technology Group, a company owned by the president-elect’s family, is negotiating the takeover of Bakkt, a cryptocurrency exchange platform. On the same day, software company MicroStrategy, the largest holder of bitcoins listed on Wall Street, announced that it had spent $4.6 billion in one week to bolster its portfolio, which now stands at over $32 billion. It has boosted the company’s share price, which has risen sevenfold since the start of the year.
Impact of halving
American investors are not the only ones trying to cash in on this crypto momentum. At Coinhouse, the leading French trading platform specializing in cryptocurrency, “November has already surpassed October,” said Nicolas Louvet, its director general, recalling that the movement already began in October, after a “rather low” third quarter. In his view, while the US presidential election was “the flame that made everything explode in the right direction,” it also crystallized other fundamental factors favorable to cryptocurrency.
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