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The price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies soared on Monday, extending a rally set off last week by the reelection of former President Donald Trump.
Bitcoin climbed 6.5% in value in early trading on Monday, hitting a record high as it surged past $84,000 for the first time ever. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, jumped more than 3%.
The euphoria also lifted lesser-known coins. The price of litecoin increased more than 4%, while dogecoin climbed 21%.
“They’ve been collectively on a tear,” Katie Stockton, the founder of market research firm Fairlead Strategies, told ABC News. “Much like bitcoin, we’ve seen breakouts across the cryptocurrency markets.”
The digital asset boom appears to reflect investor enthusiasm about Trump, who has vowed to bolster the cryptocurrency sector and ease regulations enforced by the Biden administration, experts told ABC News.
In July, Trump told the audience at a cryptocurrency conference in Nashville, Tennessee, that he wanted to turn the U.S. into the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Trump promised to weaken federal oversight of cryptocurrency and establish the federal government’s first National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Trump also said he would replace Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, whom many crypto proponents dislike for his robust approach to crypto regulation.
“Crypto has moved a lot since the election, and to me that’s on the news of a changing regulatory environment,” Bryan Routledge, a professor of finance at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, told ABC News.
The growth in cryptocurrency prices on Monday far outpaced the U.S. stock market performance. In early trading, the S&P 500 ticked up 0.25%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.75%, or about 330 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq increased just 0.1% in early trading on Monday.
The sharp run-up of bitcoin prices marked a breakthrough for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. However, the recent rise follows a period of stellar returns that stretches back to last year. The price of bitcoin has soared 122% since November 2023.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, July 27, 2024.
Brett Carlsen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Those gains have been propelled in part by U.S. approval in January of Bitcoin ETFs, or Exchange-Traded Funds. Bitcoin ETFs allow investors to buy into an asset that tracks the price movement of bitcoin, while avoiding the inconvenience and risk of purchasing the crypto coin itself.
“If you look at how the price of bitcoin has moved a lot over the last year, the rise over the last week is a bit stunning but the rise over the last year has been five times as stunning,” Routledge said.
The crypto industry entered this year bruised after a series of high-profile collapses and company scandals.
FTX, a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsed in November 2022. The implosion set off a 17-month legal saga that resulted in the conviction of Bankman-Fried for fraud. In April, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, was sentenced to four months in prison in April after pleading guilty to charges that his platform had enabled illicit financial activity.
The prolonged recovery of cryptocurrency in recent years has proven remarkable but it also stands amid volatility that has typified digital assets since the founding of bitcoin in 2009, David Yermack, a professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of Business, told ABC News.
“It can drop and it can go up very, very quickly,” Yermack said. “It’s extraordinarily volatile.”
Cryptocurrency will likely remain highly volatile even if Trump eases regulations, experts said.
Since cryptocurrency has not gained wide adoption as a means of facilitating exchange, the asset primarily serves as a store of value, akin to gold, Routledge said. Such assets sometimes demonstrate sharp increases in value due to a favorable economic environment, but they also carry substantial risks, Routledge said.
“We don’t use cryptocurrency to buy coffee,” Routledge said. “It serves as digital gold. Those types of assets tend to be fairly volatile.”