Still propelled by Donald Trump’s victory in the American presidential election, bitcoin seemed on track on Friday to end the week above the $100,000 mark per unit. Around 11:00 a.m., the digital currency was worth $98,945.
Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump expressed his support for cryptocurrencies, pledging to make the United States the “cryptocurrency capital of the world,” notes John Plassard of Mirabaud Banque, in a commentary. Never stingy with promises, the Republican candidate also wanted to create a national stock of bitcoins. In the wake of the election, US-based Bitcoin ETFs attracted more than $4 billion in inflows, the expert adds.
Bitcoin also benefited greatly from Thursday’s announcement of the resignation with effect from January 20, the day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, of the president of the American Financial Markets Regulatory Authority (SEC), Gary Gensler. In the minutes that followed, the queen digital currency set a new absolute record at $99,022.69 per unit, close to the symbolic threshold of $100,000.
The president-elect said during the electoral campaign that he wanted to remove Mr. Gensler, considered in the community as the sworn enemy of cryptocurrencies, as soon as he came to power. In the absence of a clear legislative framework, Mr. Gensler, a former banker, chose a repressive approach to digital currencies, which he intended to regulate like traditional financial securities.
On this contested legal basis, the SEC sued three of the largest exchanges, Binance, Coinbase and Kraken, as well as a series of smaller companies.
Also on Thursday, a federal court in Fort Worth, in the state of Texas, rejected a new point of regulation introduced by the SEC which amounted to broadening the definition of broker to cryptocurrency platforms, inflicting a new setback on the regulator. The American market policeman has already suffered several legal setbacks, which pushed him to authorize the marketing, at the beginning of the year, of new investment products, called ETFs (exchange traded funds), which allow you to benefit from fluctuations in bitcoin without buying it directly.
Donald Trump’s desire to get rid of him before the end of his mandate had caused a debate between lawyers and academics in the absence of established case law. It is generally agreed that the future American president could have appointed a new chairman of the SEC but could not have forced Gary Gensler to leave the regulator’s board, of which he is one of the five members.
Appointed by President Joe Biden, the sixty-year-old was theoretically not expected to complete his five-year term on the SEC board until April 2026.
A field of innovation, the world of cryptocurrencies and “blockchain”, the technology on which digital currencies are built, also represents a space conducive to scams and scams, because it is poorly regulated and guarantees a form of anonymity. It was notably the scene of the most significant financial scandal since the fall of Bernard Madoff, namely the implosion of FTX, at the end of 2022, at the time the second largest cryptocurrency exchange platform.
His boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison for fraud and criminal conspiracy. As for that of Binance, the world’s leading platform, he pleaded guilty to violating American money laundering legislation in November 2023. As part of an agreement with the American government, he agreed to resign. Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison in April and released in September.
This article was automatically published. Sources: ats/awp
