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Bitcoin’s rise to a level not seen in more than a month has many wondering when its price will get back to six digits — and what exactly it will take.
Maybe not as much as you’d think.
Bitcoin was trading around $93,700 at 1:30 pm ET — up 12% from a week ago.
The crypto market benefits from a foundation of “long-term structural growth drivers,” YouHodler markets chief Ruslan Lienkha reminded me — namely deeper integration with TradFi, improving regulatory clarity in the US, adoption via bitcoin ETFs, etc.
A quick note on the inflows into the US spot $BTC funds yesterday:
Headwinds in recent months preventing a new all-time high above ~$109,000 include mixed expectations around US tariff policy, future Fed actions and the potential for a recession. That has, as you know, more broadly sent the stock market tumbling in recent weeks.
That said, Lienkha’s view is: “Bitcoin does not require a strong equity rally to move higher. Simply a stable and less volatile macro backdrop would likely be sufficient to support renewed upside momentum.”
While $BTC crashed alongside equities earlier this month, it has more recently strayed from acting as a high-beta version of US tech stocks. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes alludes to this in a Tuesday blog post — and in his convo with Forward Guidance’s own Felix Jauvin.
“Now that the global community believes Trump is a madman crudely and savagely wielding the tariff weapon, any investor with US stocks and bonds is looking for something whose value is anti-establishment,” Hayes wrote in the blog post. “Physically, that’s gold. Digitally, that’s bitcoin.”
Major economies printing money to cushion the effects of declining globalization would serve as a tailwind for $BTC, he added to Jauvin.
We’ve written before about how various market participants perceive bitcoin as a risk-on asset. That’s despite the asset sharing global, scarce properties similar to gold — a metal that has hit new price highs amid the latest market turbulence.
Hayes believes $BTC bottomed at $74,500, adding optimistically: “Bitcoin will shed its association with said tech stocks and will rejoin gold in the ‘Up Only’ cuddle puddle.”
I’ll say it for him — that’s not investment advice.