The Year in Bitcoin: From ETFs to All-Time Highs

It was year unlike any other for Bitcoin, from new technological advancements and historic milestones to finding a home on Wall Street and being used as a political football in the U.S. elections.

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Here’s a look back at the year that was for the world’s largest crypto.

Bitcoin ETFs, a decade in the waiting

The Securities and Exchange Commission had spent a decade saying “no” to top asset managers who wished to offer a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund—the once elusive Bitcoin ETF—to their clients in the United States. But the mood shifted when the world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, applied to the SEC for a Bitcoin ETF of its own in June 2023.

An ETF is an investment vehicle that allows its buyers to gain exposure to an asset without buying and storing the asset directly. Gold ETFs, for instance, have long been a thing, and provide investors the convenience of investing in gold without fussing about finding a place to safely keep physical bars or coins.

But the SEC had been wary of allowing such a thing for Bitcoin, denying applications over and over again on the grounds that the crypto market could be easily manipulated.

Industry analysts thought BlackRock jumping in and lending its weight would finally be the thing that pushed the regulator to give the green light. And it turns out it was. On January 10, the SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs, with 10 trading the following day. The U.S. market at last had a way for mom and pop retail investors to put a little money into Bitcoin without bothering with cryptocurrency exchanges, wallets, and seed phrases. It was huge—and it had a bigger impact than even the most optimistic Bitcoin proponents imagined.

All-time highs 

Nobody—not even those whose job it is to analyze the niche market of ETFs—expected such a roaring start once the trading began. Money hit the funds fast. Investors previously locked out of the world of crypto investing could suddenly buy shares on stock exchanges that tracked the price of Bitcoin.

The asset hit an all-time high just above $73,000 in March, CoinGecko data shows. 

But it wasn’t an easy ride. Many macroeconomic factors—not to mention government confiscations and large crypto movements—weighed on Bitcoin throughout the year.

Despite hitting a new all-time high in March, the next few months were rocky for Bitcoin as geopolitical risks—particularly in the Middle East—led investors to shift away from risk assets.

At one point, Bitcoin struggled to break higher than $60,000 due to increased tensions between Iran and Israel and missile strikes.

The German government caused further selling pressure when it sold off hundreds of millions of dollars of confiscated Bitcoin in June. 

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Then, in September, it finally happened: The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates by 50 basis points, the central bank’s first such reduction since aggressively raising rates in 2022. The central bank had hiked interest rates in a bid to tame post-pandemic inflation.

Higher interest rates generally lead investors to take a “risk off” approach, retreat from stocks and other even riskier assets like crypto, and flee to the relative safety of the U.S. dollar.

The September cut and a subsequent chop in November made the asset more appealing to investors again, leading to a price surge. The “risk on” trade was back, and it helped push crypto assets beyond just Bitcoin to all-highs.

The following month, Bitcoin did what crypto hopefuls had been prophesying for years: the asset crossed the $100,000 mark for the first time in its 15-year history in early December following the reelection of Donald Trump as U.S. president, with investors expecting a more relaxed regulatory environment for digital assets to come.

Institutions and politics 

A big reason for the surge in the price of Bitcoin was down to two things: institutions and politics. 

On November 5, Trump stunned onlookers by snapping up the Electoral College and the popular vote. The Republican candidate campaigned as a Bitcoin-friendly potential leader of America. 

“I’m laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet,” Trump said at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville back in July, promising to make the country a “Bitcoin superpower” if elected. 

Analysts and industry watchers anticipated that a Trump victory would enhance the leading digital asset. Their predictions proved accurate; shortly after being announced as the U.S.’s next president, Bitcoin’s price soared. 

Less than one month after his victory, Bitcoin hit $103,679. 

Conditions, at least in theory, are favorable for the asset to continue rising as America now has the most pro-congress crypto in its history, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, who is pro-digital assets and holds significant amounts of Bitcoin.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will be the next U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, has spoken about how Bitcoin should back the dollar, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz has voted for pro-crypto bills. 

A number of other Republicans and Trump-backers are also in favor of pro-crypto policy. All eyes are now on whether a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a plan for the U.S. government to hold billions worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet for years to come, will be approved when Trump takes the reins in January. 

The approval of the spot ETFs opened the doors to traditional finance bigwigs like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley investing in cryptocurrency via the vehicles. 

In the words of MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor, 2024 was “year zero of institutional adoption.” 

Companies bought bitcoin

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Speaking of Saylor, the Bitcoin preacher’s company aggressively snapped up Bitcoin in 2024—accelerating its buys towards the end of the year. 

The software firm’s stock soared to all-time highs, and its co-founder continued to beat the Bitcoin drum, speaking far and wide about how the cryptocurrency could save a company. 

The billionaire—whose company held 444,462 Bitcoins, valued at around $42 billion at the time of writing—even shared a Bitcoin adoption strategy with the Microsoft board of directors. The company decided not to buy Bitcoin—despite admitting it had mulled over the matter. 

However, other small companies like Japan’s MetaPlanet and U.S. public companies such as Semler Scientific and Cosmos Health bought the asset as an inflation hedge. 

The Halving happened 

But it was more than just ETFs and institutional adoption that helped put the spotlight on Bitcoin in 2024. The timing was such that one of the most anticipated events for Bitcoiners happened this year as well: the Bitcoin halving.

The event, baked into Bitcoin’s code, happens every four years and is meant to keep Bitcoin’s inflation rate in check. After every halving, the reward for successfully mining a Bitcoin block is cut in half, meaning less Bitcoin now enters the system. This will keep happening until the mining reward is phased out completely, and Bitcoin reaches its fixed supply of 21 million coins.

But this halving was different than the ones before, as investors focused on it more than ever. Why? Again, timing. Increased adoption and the success of Bitcoin ETFs led more people to anticipate that the event would raise the asset’s value. After all, less supply and more demand should lead to higher prices.

And despite the event being somewhat underwhelming, the coin, for the first time, did hit a new all-time high even before its halving in April. 

Runes were a thing

This halving also brought with it something else: a short-lived craze for a new technical advancement on the Bitcoin network: Runes.

Casey Rodarmor, the man behind Ordinals inscriptions—launched last year—created a new standard for creating tokens on the blockchain called Runes. The Runes protocol launched on the same day as the Bitcoin halving and proved popular—for a while—with dog-themed meme coins gaining traction on the network and surging in value. 

However, some in the community were unhappy about what the Runes mania did to the biggest and oldest crypto network: transaction fees soared whenever there was a flurry of activity on the blockchain to mint the new tokens. 

Still, even if it was just an annoying craze in the eyes of some, the launch proved that Bitcoin had more use cases to offer than just hold and hope “number goes up.”

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair