Bitcoin broke through $94,000 and updated its all-time high – this time Trump has nothing to do with it

Bitcoin has again reached an all-time high. And this is not due to the results of the US elections, but to the fact that a new product has appeared on Wall Street that is almost guaranteed to increase the popularity of digital currency among financial institutions: options trading has begun on spot bitcoin exchange traded funds (bitcoin ETFs). ).

Bitcoin’s new all-time high was $94,038.97, according to CoinDesk data. The previous record of $93,780 was set on November 13. At the time of publication of this material, the main cryptocurrency had fallen slightly and was trading around $93,910, which corresponds to a daily increase of more than 4%.

Other cryptocurrencies are reacting more restrainedly to news of Bitcoin’s growth. For example, the Ethereum rate at the time of publication is $3139 – it has hardly changed in a day, in turn, Solana rose to $243 (+3%), and the Dogecoin memcoin even jumped by 12% to $0.41. Meanwhile, the CoinDesk 20—an index of the 20 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization excluding stablecoins, memcoins and exchange-traded tokens—was up just 1.2%.

Options contracts allow investors to buy or sell an asset at a specific price and time. Although the Chicago Stock Exchange has already offered options on Bitcoin, options on the spot Bitcoin ETF are an important development for both retail investors and financial institutions. “This will strengthen investor confidence in the asset, attracting new cohorts, providing greater diversity in investment and trading strategies,” says Noelle Acheson, former head of market research at Genesis.

Options are currently available in only one of the eleven US spot Bitcoin ETFs, BlackRock’s IBIT, and demand has proven to be high. “IBIT options volume is in the hundreds of millions so far (which is a lot for day one),” Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas wrote on Platform X.