(Bloomberg) — Bitcoin's rally is buzzing in the final days of a record-breaking year for the digital asset, as investors assess the remaining stimulus from President-elect Donald Trump's embrace of the currency sector digital.
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The top ticket changed hands at $96,200 as of 6 a.m. Friday in London, partially accounting for a retreat of nearly 3% from a day earlier. Smaller rivals including Ether and Dogecoin, a favorite of the meme crowd, oscillated in tight ranges.
Trump is pushing ahead with a promise to create a crypto-friendly environment in the United States and has backed the idea of establishing a national Bitcoin reserve. Traders are banking some of the profits fueled by the Republicans' crypto cheerleading and waiting to see if the touted reserve is viable.
Options expire
The crypto market is also set for the end of a significant amount of Bitcoin and Ether options contracts on Friday – one of the largest such events in the history of digital assets, according to the leading broker FalconX.
The notional value of the Bitcoin contracts on the Deribit exchange – one of the largest for digital asset derivatives – exceeds $ 14 billion, while the corresponding figure for Ether is around $ 3.8 billion.
Sean McNulty, director of trading at liquidity provider Arbelos Markets, pointed to the risk of a “real market” in the midst of expiring derivatives positions.
MicroStrategy Plan
Bitcoin is unsteady even after MicroStrategy Inc. this week indicated the possibility of expanding its program of buying the token. The company has transformed itself from a software maker to a Bitcoin accumulator and now owns more than $40 billion of the digital asset.
The original cryptocurrency is flirting with a decline for December, its first monthly decline in four, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $108,316 on December 17 before pulling back.
Investors withdrew a net $1.5 billion from a group of a dozen US Bitcoin-exchange-traded funds in the four trading days through Dec. 24, the heaviest such outflows since Trump's Nov. 5 US election victory.
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