Mint Primer: Bitcoin has scaled the $100k peak. Can it crash too?
In January, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) boosted bitcoin by approving exchange-traded funds. Bitcoin had already risen to over $40,000 from $16,500 at the start of 2023, in anticipation of this. ETFs enabled institutional investors to hold bitcoin, giving it substantial backing as an asset. As brokerages invested, bitcoin rose to $75,000 by June. But, selling by large wallets dragged it down to nearly $50,000 in September. Trump, a bitcoin investor, sparked a rally again by winning the election. The nomination of Paul Atkins, a crypto advocate, to lead the SEC, took the price past $100,000.
Most stakeholders expect cryptocurrencies to continue rising in value, if the US-fuelled euphoria sustains. In fact, many analysts, including critical ones such as the US-based Alex Dobvnya, have said that bitcoin, with a market cap of $2.02 trillion at the time of publishing this story, is now “too big to fail". The bellwether crypto token can also impact other tokens positively, leading to cryptocurrencies growing bigger still. Many have called it to be on the verge of “mainstream" adoption, although such claims are not true yet. In the near term, though, everyone expects bitcoin to rise further.
Ethereum’s ETH has risen 70% since January, and is close to its 52-week high at $3,863. Ripple’s XRP, the fourth-largest with a market cap of $135 billion, has risen 3.8x this year. Solana (SOL), the next-biggest with a market cap of $111 billion, has risen 2.5x. Each of the world’s top 10 crypto tokens has risen 2–4x this year, qualifying 2024 as a “bull" year for it.
Critics of cryptocurrencies have warned that while blockchain has concrete real-world use cases, the same isn’t true of tokens—which aren’t tied to any
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