Bitcoin came close to surpassing $94,000 for the first time ever in late-Tuesday exchanges.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency peaked at a new all-time high of $93,905 before a bout of profit taking sent it back to $93,300 at the time of writing.
Bitcoin has been remarkably well bid since president-elect Donald Trump’s overwhelming victory over Kamala Harris in the US presidential elections.
Trump has pledged to promote pro-crypto policies and create a ‘Bitcoin Strategi Reserve’ to increase the government’s ownership of the digital currency.
Reports that Trump’s social media company Trump Media and Technology Group is finalising an all-stock acquisition on crypto trading platform Bakkt have added even more fuel to the Trump trade fire.
Negotiations between TMTG and Bakky are in the advanced stages, according to the Financial Times.
Bitcoin is seeing even more buying support after BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) officially launched options trading on its iShare Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT).
According to Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart, nearly $1.9 billion in options trading was tallied on the first day of trading, the overwhelming majority of which were calls.
UPDATE: Final tally of $IBIT's 1st day of options is just shy of $1.9 billion in notional exposure traded via 354k contracts. 289k were Calls & 65k were Puts. That's a ratio of 4.4:1. These options were almost certainly part of the move to the new #Bitcoin all time highs today pic.twitter.com/IN3s9hajJ2— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) November 19, 2024
The BTC/USD pair is now up more than 120% year to date.