The price of Bitcoin (BTC) is going up, ladies and gentlemen. Or should we say the price of the United States dollar (USD) is going down? The crypto news is abuzz this week; pretty much every digital coin on the market is trending upwards as we go to press – except for stablecoins like USDC and Tether (USDT), which are trading at slightly less than one sawbuck.
Bitcoin is still the King of All Cryptocurrency, though, and it’s heading back towards that magic US$100,000 barrier that it first eclipsed in early December. After settling back down around $80K, the price of Bitcoin has shot all the way up to $93,939.03 at the time of this writing, gaining roughly 12% this past week alone.
Will it last this time? The fine folks at BetOnline (visit our BetOnline Review) say it’s a toss-up whether Bitcoin will be Over or Under $100,000.50 at the end of 2025; both sides of this wager are priced at -120 on the financial odds board. It’s a somewhat pessimistic market given that Bitcoin was projected to reach $200K or even $250K sometime this calendar year. Perhaps we can take advantage with an informed wager or two.
Why Is Bitcoin Going Up?
The weakening of the U.S. dollar is playing the lead role, at least in the short term. There are several long-term reasons why Bitcoin is on the rise, including last year’s halving event and Donald Trump’s libertarian shift towards cryptocurrency. These factors help make Bitcoin a more desirable financial asset with a somewhat more stable future.
Having said that, Trump is driving this bus right now with his ongoing attempts to weaken the U.S. dollar. The prevailing theory within the Republican Party is that American manufacturers are being penalized by an artificially strong dollar; by threatening protectionist measures, the hope is that they can re-enact the 1985 Plaza Accord that Ronald Reagan coerced Japan, the UK, France and West Germany into signing. Call it the Mar-a-Lago Accord if it happens in 2025.
Is It Working?
The part about weakening the dollar is definitely on track. USD prices have tumbled about 10% since Trump re-entered the Oval Office in January; the last time they were this low was back in March 2022.
Whether this will have the downstream effect of bringing manufacturers back to American shores remains to be seen – or if the juice will be worth the squeeze. But for the moment, investors are dumping their USD-based securities and scooping up old-school commodities like gold, which is up 12.8% over the past month to $3,288.09 per ounce.
Is Crypto a Security or a Commodity?
That’s where things get a bit fuzzy. The previous chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, believed that most digital coins were indeed securities – except for Bitcoin, which he declared a commodity in 2022. This paved the way for the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in 2024.
Meet the new boss. Paul Atkins, who was sworn in as the new SEC chair on April 9, appears willing to open up the crypto market by taking more of these coins out of the securities bucket. The SEC has already done this with USD-pegged stablecoins such as Tether, designating them as “Covered Stablecoins” that fall outside their jurisdiction. Others are likely to follow.
Assuming this plan continues to unfold, this means Bitcoin won’t have quite the same grip on the crypto market as it does now. Investors who are shedding their securities may be tempted to look more closely instead at Ethereum (ETH), which is up 15.1% this week to $1,794.06, or they might prefer the newer kid on the DeFi block, Solana (SOL), up 20.1% to $151.21 at press time.
Still, as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats. There’s way too much volatility out there for investors to be confident in any speculative asset class, so size your investments and your financial bets accordingly, but if you’re forecasting the price of Bitcoin at the end of 2025, six figures seems eminently reasonable.
