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Bitcoin’s price reached roughly $73,500 after 3 pm ET on Tuesday. It dipped to about $72,600 by 4 pm ET — up 4% from 24 hours ago.
This surge to just below BTC’s record high (above $73,700, set in March) comes as capital continues to pour into US spot bitcoin ETFs. Another $479 million of net new money entered that category on Monday, Farside Investors data shows.
Those funds have seen $22.5 billion worth of net inflows since launching in January — with nearly $3.9 billion, or 17%, of those gains coming since Oct. 11.
“I think that is people recognizing that the train may leave the station sometime around the election,” Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan said during an X space late last week.
Hougan’s firm — a crypto-focused asset manager that offers both a BTC and ETH ETF — regularly meets with institutions about possible crypto allocations. The number of meetings that have led to such an allocation have gone up “significantly” in recent weeks, he explained.
A portion of these institutional players have embraced what he called “crypto sleeves,” Hougan added during the X space — exposure not just to a bitcoin fund, but perhaps an allocation to another that holds ETH and additional exposure to MicroStrategy or bitcoin miners.
“[It’s] the idea of treating crypto the same way you treat stocks, which is you don’t just buy Nvidia; you buy a basket,” he said.
Beyond institutional buy-in, bitcoin investors are betting on governments continuing to debase fiat currencies, Hougan noted in a CIO memo. But, he argues, BTC does not need the dollar to collapse to hit $200,000, adding: “It can get there just by capturing a sliver of gold’s existing market.”
Thoughts differ on the trajectory of crypto prices from here in the case of a Trump or Harris victory. But perhaps we won’t have to wait for the election to wrap up before seeing BTC notch a new all-time high.
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