The current soaring price is no coincidence, but an expression of a fundamental change.
Recently, over one billion dollars of new capital has been flowing into the major Bitcoin ETFs in the US every day. Big investors, from BlackRock to Fidelity, now have Bitcoin as a part of their strategies. Hedge funds, family offices and even pension funds are allocating between 1 and 3 percent of their assets. Not because it is cool, but because it is rational and is part of their own diversification strategy.
The most important driver of this development comes from politics. Since Donald Trump returned to the stage at the beginning of the year, the regulatory climate in the US has changed radically. Instead of a fight against crypto, we are seeing a political embrace: Bitcoin has been brought into the US Treasury Department as a strategic reserve. Stablecoins have been clearly regulated by the Genius Act and must now be fully backed by short-term US government bonds. This not only strengthens the T-bill market, but also makes stablecoins a geopolitical extension of the dollar, and thus a reality in financial markets worldwide.
This is because many people do not know that stablecoin providers such as Circle invest large parts of the money raised in short-term government bonds, which is hugely important for the USA. At the same time, US stablecoins allow anyone in the world with internet access to buy and hold US dollars with two clicks. This is groundbreaking for the spread of the US dollar around the world – and it is psychologically revolutionary if broad sections of the population, even in Africa or in countries with weak currencies, can suddenly hold US dollars and participate in the yield instead of being expropriated in their own currency every month.
When the world's largest industrialized nation makes crypto and stablecoins part of its economic and financial policy, this is not a local phenomenon. It sets off a chain reaction. In Europe, too, we are seeing banks approaching us to dock onto Bitpanda white label solutions in order to gain access to crypto infrastructure. Not because they want to, but because they have to. Customers are asking for it, the competition is not sleeping, and the regulatory go-ahead has long been on the table. It is the next step in the digitalization of the financial sector. And Bitcoin is the flag bearer of this movement.
Some old-school economists and politicians in Germany do not seem to be 100 percent aware of this yet, but even these skeptics are becoming fewer and fewer. Because what many overlook: Thousands of developers are working on the Bitcoin protocol. That it is an open source network that is constantly being developed. That it is now extremely transparent and transactions can be traced back seamlessly.
Another absurd argument is that Bitcoin can only be used for transactions to a limited extent because a block has a fixed size. It's like accusing the internet of lacking scalability because a modem is slow. The reality is that layer 2 solutions such as the Lightning Network have long existed and can process millions of transactions per second at minimal cost. But these technologies are rarely talked about in the old-school economy. People prefer to talk about things they do not understand.
The decisive factor is that the roadblocks are gone.
There are no longer any regulatory obstacles in the USA – on the contrary. The capital markets are open. The world's largest economic power is no longer neutral, but explicitly pro-crypto. Adoption is in full swing. More and more banks and companies are integrating crypto – not out of idealism, but because it is economically necessary.
Will Bitcoin now rise to 200,000 euros? That could very well happen. But that's not really the point. The real question is: What happens when Bitcoin is permanently anchored in the portfolios of the largest investors, in the reserves of governments and in the infrastructure of banks? Because that is exactly what is happening right now.
What we are currently experiencing is nothing less than a paradigm shift from analog to digital, from gold to Bitcoin. Gold has been the global store of value for centuries, but it comes from an era without the internet, without global real-time markets, without a networked financial infrastructure. Bitcoin is the logical evolution. The same function, but adapted to the reality of the digital age.
Bitcoin has everything that gold offers: Scarcity, independence, inflation protection – and it combines this with advantages that gold could never provide: digital transferability, 24/7 availability, true divisibility, no storage costs, no physical transportation, transparency of the money supply, auditable supply, open source infrastructure, decentralized security, global liquidity.
I am convinced that we will see a gradual approach to the market capitalization of gold over the next few years. And from that point onwards, we will no longer be talking about 100,000 or 200,000 euros per Bitcoin. Then a new price regime will begin.
But above all, it is a hedge against an inflationary monetary policy in which countries, especially the USA, continue to run up unstoppable debts.
Then Bitcoin will no longer be one asset class among many.
It will then be a dominant factor in a new, digital financial system.
And a hedge against excessive government debt.