Bitcoin Hits $100,000 as the Trump Trade Takes Over Crypto
Bitcoin crossed six figures for the first time this week, capping a rally that started at the ballot box and accelerated with every crypto-friendly appointment.
It took Bitcoin fifteen years to go from worthless code on a mailing list to a five-figure asset. It took roughly a month, from election night to this week, to add the sixth figure. On Wednesday, Bitcoin pushed past $100,000 for the first time, touching an intraday high near $103,900 before settling around $103,100, according to Forbes.
The number itself is arbitrary, a round figure that means nothing to the underlying code. But round numbers move markets, and this one arrived with a story attached that traders had been waiting on since early November: an American president who ran on being crypto's ally rather than its skeptic.
What actually pushed Bitcoin over $100,000?
The proximate trigger was personnel, not price action. Bitcoin cleared six figures hours after President-elect Donald Trump named Paul Atkins, a longtime crypto advocate, as his pick to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Al Jazeera's reporting. Markets read the appointment as confirmation that the SEC's adversarial posture toward the industry under Gary Gensler was about to end.
That single appointment was really the capstone on a month of accumulating signals. Since Trump's November 5 victory, Bitcoin has climbed more than 130 percent for the year, according to figures cited by CNN, comfortably outpacing the S&P 500's roughly 28 percent gain over the same period.
How did a former crypto skeptic become its biggest booster?
The reversal is not subtle. Trump once called Bitcoin "a scam" based on "thin air." During the 2024 campaign, he did a full pivot, courting the industry's donor class and its voters directly. He promised, as PBS reported, to make the United States "the crypto capital of the planet" and to establish a "strategic national Bitcoin stockpile," a proposal to have the federal government hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset the way it holds gold.
Whether that stockpile becomes policy or stays a campaign line is still an open question heading into January. But the industry has treated the mere promise as a floor under the market, and traders have been positioning for a friendlier SEC, friendlier banking regulators, and a friendlier tone from the White House generally.
Who is actually buying at these prices?
Unlike the retail-driven mania of 2021, this run has a heavier institutional footprint. The spot ETFs approved in January gave pension funds, advisors and ordinary brokerage accounts a route into Bitcoin that did not exist a year ago, and those products have been steady buyers through the fourth quarter. The Washington Post noted the milestone landed alongside a broader rally across meme coins and crypto-adjacent stocks, evidence that enthusiasm has spread well past Bitcoin's core holders.
How does this rally compare to past Bitcoin cycles?
The shape of this move is different from the retail-driven frenzies of 2017 and 2021. Those cycles were powered heavily by individual traders piling into exchange accounts, often on borrowed money, and both ended in disorderly unwinds once leverage got stretched too far. This year's climb has leaned more on regulated products that settle through traditional brokerages, a structure that tends to move with more institutional discipline, if not necessarily less volatility.
That does not mean risk has vanished. A market this dependent on continued political tailwinds, an SEC chair who has not even been confirmed yet, a stockpile proposal that exists only as a campaign promise, is still a market trading on expectations that have not been tested by an actual policy fight in Washington.
Has the milestone changed how ordinary investors see Bitcoin?
Financial advisors describe the change in client conversations as noticeable rather than dramatic. Where crypto questions were once framed defensively, clients asking whether they were being reckless for even considering it, this year's version of the same conversation increasingly starts from a different premise: a client who already owns a Bitcoin ETF position asking whether it is time to add more. The psychological weight of a six-figure price tag, arbitrary as the number is mathematically, has done real work in reframing the asset for people who never touched a crypto exchange in their lives.
Search interest and account openings at major brokerages spiked alongside the price, a pattern that echoes previous Bitcoin milestones going back to its first run past $1,000 in 2013. What is different this time is how many of those new entrants are buying through retirement accounts and taxable brokerage accounts rather than crypto-native apps, a direct legacy of January's ETF approval, a channel that simply did not exist the last time Bitcoin was setting records.
What happens now that the number is behind us?
Round-number milestones tend to produce a mix of profit-taking and fresh momentum, and this one is unlikely to be different. Wall Street desks were already floating $200,000 targets for next year even before the ink dried on this week's close, per reporting from Yahoo Finance. Whether that materializes depends on decisions that have not been made yet: who actually runs bank regulators, what a Bitcoin reserve proposal looks like in legislative text, and whether Congress passes the market structure bill the industry has been lobbying for since 2022.
For now, the number stands. Bitcoin is worth more than $100,000, more people can buy it through accounts they already have, and the White House that takes office next month is the friendliest one crypto has ever had. What the industry does with that opening is the story of 2025.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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