Bitcoin Tops $73,000—A 7-Month High—As Election, Inflation Questions Swirl

 Bitcoin just hit its priciest level since the spring as several market conditions, including next week’s U.S. presidential election, impact the $1.4 trillion cryptocurrency.

Trump gives a keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville in July. Getty Images

Bitcoin rose about 6% to as high as $73,544 at about 3 p.m. EDT, or 7 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, Tuesday, the highest price for the token since March 14 (price movements in the 24/7 bitcoin market is most commonly measured in GMT), forbes.com.

That moves bitcoin’s October gain to 13%, outstripping the leading American stock index S&P 500’s 1% advance this month.

Other major digital assets rallied Tuesday, with ethereum up 4% to a 10-day high of $2.637, Binance coin up 2% to an eight-day high of $608 and Solana up 2% to a three-month high of $182.

Also rallying were stocks of companies involved in bitcoin mining, the energy intensive process in which bitcoins are unlocked from the digital blockchain: Shares of Core Scientific, Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms each gained Tuesday and are up at least 15% apiece in October.

The bitcoin-led crypto rally is a confluence of several factors. Investors such as hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones have called on bitcoin as a hedge against inflation as the government and presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump support policies that economists project will add trillions of dollars to the national debt. And with the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates last month, skeptics believe monetary policy may be ill-equipped to correct inflation. Prices for the more conventional safe haven asset, gold, have also jumped, with gold up 6% since the Sept. 18 rate cut. The rise in bitcoin prices have also coincided with climbing betting market odds for a Trump victory, as the previous bitcoin skeptic Trump positions himself as the pro-bitcoin candidate, calling for a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile.” And there’s continued upward pressure from the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds approved by U.S. regulators in January, which attracted billions of dollars of inflows from institutional investors into the digital asset, according to Bernstein research.

Big Number

$66 billion. That’s how much bitcoin is held by the spot bitcoin ETFs operated by legacy asset managers BlackRock and Fidelity and more digital-focused players like Grayscale, or about 5% of the global bitcoin market.

Key Background

Bitcoin is by far the most valuable crypto token with an aggregate market value more than four times that of the next biggest digital asset, ethereum, which in turn is more than three times larger than the third largest crypto token, Binance coin, excluding the stablecoin Tether. Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $73,750 in March, and is up more than 300% from its late 2022 nadir during the “crypto winter,” when a string of high-profile bankruptcies for one-time titans in the industry, including the exchange FTX, shook confidence.