Crypto frenzy: With Bitcoin above $100,000, will ‘Hodlers’ have the last laugh?
Live MintWhat is there to say with Bitcoin above $100,000 for those of us who thought $10,000 looked nuts? The flip-side of having no intrinsic value and a decentralized architecture with a huge energy footprint means that nobody uses Bitcoin to buy groceries, though: Only 7% of US consumers hold Bitcoin, and a survey published last month by the UK Financial Conduct Authority found only 16% of people who owned crypto used these tokens for payments. Almost $10 billion has flowed into Bitcoin exchange-traded funds since Trump’s win, which makes sense given the likely gains to be had from regulatory forbearance. Gary Gensler’s departure from the US Securities and Exchange Commission likely means more breathing space for tokens that have laboured under the “unregistered securities" label, making US-based Coinbase Global an obvious beneficiary of onshore trading flows and products; its shares have doubled this year. And while ‘digital gold’ is a handy moniker that lets optimists imagine another tenfold rise for Bitcoin—taking its market capitalization to $20 trillion, or on par with gold—its price has lately been correlated with tech stocks on the Nasdaq index, suggesting real-world macro conditions must remain healthy to maintain that speculative lustre.