Bitcoin Hits Major Milestone of $100K, Nears $2 Trillion Market Value

Bitcoin's price has surged past the $100,000 mark for the first time in its history, fueled by institutional demand, corporate accumulation and heightened expectations of crypto-friendly policies under Donald Trump's presidency.

Now ahead about 130% year-to-date, bitcoin's market capitalization has risen to just shy of $2 trillion only 15 years after coming into existence. For reference, Nvidia and Apple sport market caps of about $3.5 trillion, Microsoft $3 trillion, and Google and Amazon $2.2 trillion. The market capitalization of all the gold in the world is roughly $17.7 trillion.

At the forefront of this rally was the early-2024 launch of spot-based bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETF) by asset management giants including BlackRock and Fidelity. These products have been a resounding success, securing assets under management of around $30 billion in less than one year's time.

Despite the success of the ETFs, the move higher in bitcoin seemingly stalled throughout a large chunk of this year, at least in part thanks to regulatory uncertainty surrounding the U.S. presidential election. The early November victory of crypto-friendly Donald Trump, though, spurred new legs for the rally, with bitcoin quickly taking out its March high above $73,500, then in fast time moving past $80,000, then $90,000, and finally $100,000 just minutes ago.

Corporate adoption

Another large part of the bull story is growing corporate adoption, led by MicroStrategy (MSTR) and its Executive Chairman Michael Saylor. The company — which began its bitcoin purchases in August 2020 — has continued to raise billions of dollars to deploy into bitcoin, taking its holdings to 386,700 tokens which are now worth more than $38 billion. Saylor and team have inspired other publicly traded companies, U.S.-listed Semler Scientific and Japan-listed Metaplanet among them, to pursue similar strategies. Even tech giant Microsoft has a proposal before its board as to whether it should pursue a bitcoin treasury strategy.