The leaders of Wall Street’s two major regulatory agencies may both be cryptocurrency-friendly!
Bitcoin was trading around $100,000 in Asian trading on Thursday, helped by further signs that cryptocurrency advocates will help shape U.S. financial regulations under President-elect Donald Trump.
The latest development is that Brian Quintenz, the policy director at a16z Crypto, the digital asset unit of venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz and a former Republican CFTC commissioner, has emerged as the favorite to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
In the Asian session on Thursday, the price of Bitcoin was trading around $101,000.
Trump’s push to roll back the Biden administration’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies in favor of lighter regulation helped Bitcoin reach an all-time high of $103,800 on Dec. 5. Since then, cryptocurrency prices have fluctuated around six-figure levels.
Increased expectations of a Federal Reserve rate cut also helped boost investor sentiment on Wednesday. Speculators increased their bets on a rate cut by the Federal Reserve after U.S. CPI inflation met expectations, and the prospect of loose monetary policy pushed the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index to a record high.
“The market likes to see inflation in line with expectations,” said Henry Elder, head of UTXO Management, adding that traders are “trying to figure out if $100,000 is a ceiling or a floor for Bitcoin.”
In addition to supportive regulations, Trump has also supported the idea of establishing a strategic national Bitcoin reserve, and while many have questioned the feasibility of the latter, the president-elect’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said his father “would be an incredible ally to this industry.”
Trump was a skeptic of digital assets in the past but switched sides after the industry touted its benefits during the U.S. election. The Republican now has his own cryptocurrency project in the crypto world, a controversial space with a history fraught with volatility, fraud and criminal activity.
Since Trump won the U.S. election on November 5, the largest cryptocurrency has risen by about 50%, thanks to about $11 billion of funds flowing into U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) during this period. Equivalent products for Ethereum, the second-largest digital asset, attracted $2.4 billion. #DeFi全线飙升 #BTC重返10万
