Bitcoin flirting with all-time high

Bitcoin is almost unstoppable. On Tuesday, October 29, the cryptocurrency again kicked off a price rally and narrowly missed the all-time high.

Bitcoin is almost unstoppable. On Tuesday, October 29, the cryptocurrency kicked off another price rally and just missed the all-time high.

According to CoinGecko, BTC stood at 20:16 CET at $73,562. That’s under $200 away from its record high of $73,737. Yet Bitcoin failed to break the level set on March 14, 2024 and the price pulled back. At the time of writing, the digital gold is at $72,528, just 1.7 percent below the peak. Can Bitcoin break the record today?

Yesterday’s price surge hasn’t gone unnoticed in the traditional financial sector either; demand for Bitcoin ETFs surged. A total of 11,800 BTC flowed into ETF publishers’ books. By comparison, about 450 coins are mined daily on the Bitcoin network. The ETFs alone pulled twenty times the daily Bitcoin issuance from the market yesterday.

The bulk of this went to BlackRock. The world’s biggest asset manager has launched the most successful BTC ETF with the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT). On Tuesday alone, 8,580 BTC flowed to BlackRock. BlackRock now holds 408,250 BTC.

Volatility is bringing back trading volume in the derivatives markets as well. Open option contracts sit at $25.8 billion. Most traders are betting on rising prices: 66% of bets are call options.

What’s notable is the public’s not catching much of the rally. Google Trends shows little interest in BTC. How things unfold depends a lot on the US elections. Traders are increasingly pricing in a possible Trump win. If Democratic candidate Harris wins, a price correction is likely.