Bitcoin surged past the $100,000 mark on Thursday for the first time since February, buoyed by news of a trade agreement between Washington and London, which eased investor concerns over risky assets like cryptocurrencies.
Stéphane Ifrah, Head of Investments at Coinhouse, told French news agency AFP that this development signals “a clear return of risk appetite” as the US appears more reasonable by making deals with other countries and cryptocurrencies rally.
Bitcoin first crossed the symbolic $100,000 threshold in December, then hit a record high of $109,241.11 on 20 January, just hours before Donald Trump took office in the United States.
The Republican campaigned on a pro-crypto platform, promising a second term that would include the creation of a national strategic reserve of bitcoins, an idea that has since been adopted. However, his series of tariff announcements later generated uncertainty in financial markets.
Despite not being directly affected by these tariffs, digital currencies fell out of favour due to their reputation for high volatility, as investors opted for safer assets such as gold.
The sector also faced setbacks this year with incidents such as the collapse of the $Libra cryptocurrency, previously advocated by Argentine President Javier Milei, and a historic $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit platform by North Korean hackers.
In early April, Bitcoin even dipped below $75,000.
In recent weeks, Bitcoin has been recovering, driven by inflows into ETFs that track its performance, noted Stéphane Ifrah.
Charlie Morris, an analyst at ByteTree, shared with AFP that the US-UK agreement is another reason to predict a Bitcoin rise, as many more agreements may follow, suggesting a thaw in the trade war.
At 16:25 GMT (18:25 Brussels time), Bitcoin, the most capitalised cryptocurrency, was up 4.22% at $100,881.
The second-largest digital currency by market capitalisation, Ether, soared 13.9% to $2,058.24.
