President-elect Donald Trump’s remarks indicating that he intends to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve in the United States, similar to its strategic oil reserve, helped push the cryptocurrency to a new high above $106,000 in early Asian trading on Monday.
The largest and most well-known cryptocurrency in the world, Bitcoin, peaked at $106,533 and was last trading at $105,688. Ether, a smaller cryptocurrency, increased by about 3% to 4,014.
Tony Sycamore said
“We’re in blue sky territory here,”.
“The next figure the market will be looking for is $110,000. The pullback that a lot of people were waiting for just didn’t happen, because now we’ve got this news.”
Trump also told CNBC late last week.
“We’re gonna do something great with crypto because we don’t want China or anybody else – not just China but others are embracing it – and we want to be the head,”
When questioned about his intentions to create a cryptocurrency reserve akin to oil reserves, Trump also added: “Yeah, I think so.”
Cryptocurrency strategic reserves have also been considered by other nations.
Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned the necessity of keeping national reserves in foreign currencies, arguing that it was more appealing to invest domestically.
Putin claimed that by exploiting the dollar for political ends, the present US government was weakening the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency and driving many nations to look to other assets, such as cryptocurrencies.
Putin also added
“For example, bitcoin, who can prohibit it? No one,”.
There are skeptics, though; earlier this month, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, likened bitcoin to gold.
“People are not using it as a form of payment, or as a store of value. It’s highly volatile, it’s not a competitor for the dollar.”
Crypto boost
Bitcoin has risen more than 50% since the election of Trump and several other pro-crypto candidates on November 5. The value of the cryptocurrency market has almost doubled this year, hitting a record of almost $3.8 trillion, according to statistics source CoinGecko.
Trump named David Sacks, a former CEO of PayPal and close friend of Trump adviser and billionaire Elon Musk, as a White House czar for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies this month.
Trump also declared that he will name Paul Atkins, a Washington-based attorney who supports cryptocurrency, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Exchange operator Nasdaq declared on Friday that MicroStrategy would be incorporated into the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 Index, following a significant surge in the bitcoin buyer’s shares.
This year, the shares of MicroStrategy, a company that actively invests in the largest cryptocurrency asset globally, have more than doubled in value, reaching a market value of over $94 billion. Among corporations, it now owns the most cryptocurrency.
