{"id":578970,"date":"2025-01-20T10:57:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T08:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=578970"},"modified":"2025-01-20T11:05:53","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T09:05:53","slug":"bitcoin-hits-r2-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cryptocurrency\/578970-bitcoin-hits-r2-million.html","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin hits R2 million"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bitcoin has set a new all-time high and surged through the significant South African milestone of R2 million per BTC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cryptocurrency rose as much as 5.5% on Monday in the hours leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. President, reaching $109,241 on international exchanges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The price rise came after Trump and his wife Melania unveiled memecoins over the weekend, with Trump’s rapidly reaching a market capitalization of more than $15 billion before declining sharply as his wife’s rose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those memecoins briefly rattled the digital-asset market, sapping flows from Bitcoin and smaller tokens while drawing criticism from industry executives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bitcoin, second-ranked token Ether and XRP all rose rapidly on Monday morning in London, with traders counting down the hours until Trump once again assumes control of the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomberg News previously reported that he’s considering an executive order designating the asset class a “national priority.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Bloomberg, the memecoins launched by Trump and his team have further accelerated Bitcoin’s momentum as retail traders look for the Republican to “prioritize and reaffirm his commitment to the crypto industry,” said Ben El-Baz, managing director of HashKey Global.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The memecoin sector, stuffed with joke tokens like Dogecoin offering little intrinsic value and high volatility, is divisive as it feeds criticism of the nascent industry as too frivolous and risky for mainstream investors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Memecoins rely on social media tailwinds that can disappear as quickly as they arise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The weekend launches are \u201cnow clearly a blight that we will have to work to put behind us as builders,\u201d said\u00a0Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto-focused venture capital company Dragonfly Capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a post on X, Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor and former chief technology officer at US crypto exchange Coinbase, said<\/a> memecoins are a zero-sum \u201clottery\u201d where the \u201cprice eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Bitcoin-Rand exchange rate between November 2022 and January 2025.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a separate post<\/a>, SkyBridge Capital LLC founder Anthony Scaramucci pointed out the launch of Melania coin caused Trump coin to sink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scaramucci was briefly Trump\u2019s director of communications in 2017 during the latter\u2019s first presidency before being fired and becoming a vocal critic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile Gabor Gurbacs, director of digital-asset strategy at investment provider VanEck until last year and founder of PointsVille, said the memecoins \u201ccost the US, the presidency and his family a lot of credibility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gurbacs said<\/a> in an X post that the consequences of the launches \u201chaven\u2019t even started\u201d and called on Trump to fire his crypto advisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While several reports have attributed the recent Bitcoin price action to Trump, other analysts said there may be many other factors at play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This includes the United States releasing softer-than-expected inflation data last week that mitigated the impact of its December employment data released the week prior and sowed doubts that policymakers would cut rates at all this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interest-rate strategists at Morgan Stanley recommended that investors position for the U.S. Federal Reserve to cut interest rates as soon as March.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These factors, combined with the anticipation of Trump following through on his pro-crypto election statements and an announcement that he would move to secure a Bitcoin reserve for the United States, have likely helped drive prices higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Reporting with Bloomberg.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin has set a new all-time high and surged through the significant South African milestone of R2 million per BTC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":570802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44696],"tags":[98492,187,68572,35045,98493,98491,98490,98489],"class_list":["post-578970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency","tag-ben-el-baz","tag-bitcoin","tag-dogecoin","tag-donald-trump","tag-dragonfly-capital","tag-hashkey-global","tag-melania-trump","tag-rob-hadick"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578970"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578970"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":578989,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578970\/revisions\/578989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}