As the US presidential election draws ever closer, crypto traders and analysts are hoping a victory for Donald Trump in November will pull the bitcoin price out of its recent stupor.
The coin, a decent proxy for all crypto activity, peaked in mid-March and has struggled to make headway since April’s so-called halving event, when the number of daily bitcoins available for miners to share for securing the bitcoin network dropped from 900 to 450. Since then, it has dropped about 15 per cent and on Friday fell below $54,000 to its lowest point since February. That has belied many predictions that, post-halving, bitcoin would begin to rally.
Analysts have suggested the lacklustre performance is due to the number of potential sales overhanging the market: $9bn of bitcoin and bitcoin cash sales from defunct Japanese exchange Mt Gox; possible sales of bitcoin by miners; and the signal sent in the past two weeks by authorities in the US and Germany, who moved chunks of criminal seizures to crypto exchanges.