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Bitcoin soars past $120,000 as analysts predict new all-time high by end of year

Friday’s price is a 97% jump from where bitcoin was a year ago.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Bitcoin is up over 10% this week, crossing $120,000 for the first time since its previous all-time high record of over $124,000 on August 14. This is a 97% jump from where bitcoin was a year ago, hovering around $60,700.

John Haar, managing director at Swan Bitcoin, told Sherwood News that bitcoin’s rise this week is due to a confluence of factors, including the government shutdown causing fiscal uncertainty, highlighting the value of assets like bitcoin and gold.

“Over the longer term, with global debt at record highs and fiat currencies under pressure, bitcoin is increasingly seen as a liquid, non-sovereign reserve asset. We’re watching a shift from speculative trades to strategic allocations, and we believe this will push price beyond prior highs,” Haar said.

Analysts are also optimistic about bitcoin’s trajectory.

JPMorgan analysts expect bitcoin to hit $165,000 by year-end, driven by the acceleration of “the debasement trade,” with retail investors rushing to buy both gold and bitcoin ETFs, they said in a note. The debasement trade refers to a slew of macroeconomic factors, including “elevated geopolitical and policy uncertainty,” “waning confidence in fiat currencies in certain emerging markets,” and “persistently high government deficits across major economies,” the analysts wrote.

Meanwhile, Citi analysts gave bitcoin a 12-month price target of $181,000 in a note this week that also gave bitcoin a year-end price target of $132,000.

Finally, Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, said the shutdown will be the primary driver of the impending all-time high.

“During the previous Trump shutdown (22 Dec 2018 to 25 Jan 2019) bitcoin was in a different place than now, so it did little. However, this year bitcoin has traded with ‘US government risks’ as best shown by its relationship to US treasury term premium,” he wrote in a note.

Bitcoin ETFs have amassed $2.25 billion in inflows since Monday. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust alone saw $466.5 million in inflows on Thursday, according to SoSoValue data.

Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas wrote in a post on X that both IBIT and the SPDR Gold ETF were in the top 10 ETFs by volume Thursday, “which is rare, everyone wants in on The Debaser Trade I guess.”

In other bitcoin news:

  • MARA Holdings, the second-largest corporate bitcoin holder, increased its holdings to 52,850 bitcoin. In addition, it produced 736 bitcoin in September, a 4% month-over-month increase.

  • Riot Platforms announced its September production, with 445 bitcoin produced, compared to 477 in August, a 7% month-over-month decrease.

  • Cango also released its September production update. The bitcoin miner produced 616.6 bitcoin for the month, compared to 663.7 in August, a 7% month-over-month decrease. 

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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