Bitcoin ATH (But Steady on the Enthusiasm)
After bouncing up and down between $100,000 and $110,000 for the last two months, bitcoin has decisively broken out.
The 16-year-old cryptocurrency reached a new peak of roughly $118,850 this morning (July 11) at 9:35 AM UTC and, as I type these words, is trading for $117,750, up roughly 5.7% in the last 24 hours.
Let’s talk numbers. More than $1.15 billion worth of shorts have been obliterated in the past 24 hours — the biggest liquidation event for bears in 2025 so far. Uncharacteristically, the move to $118k occurred on relatively low volatility, which may give us a clue as to the nature of the rally.
"Unlike past parabolic surges, this move has been a steady grind higher, orderly and largely driven by institutional flows rather than retail. So while spot is higher, realized volatility hasn’t picked up in the same way, which keeps implied vol suppressed," Pulkit Goyal, head of trading at institutional liquidity provider Orbit Markets, told CoinDesk.
Spot bitcoin ETFs, meanwhile, raked in over $1 billion in inflows on Thursday; the investment vehicles have only seen this kind of influx four times since they launched a year and a half ago. BlackRock’s IBIT also notched another record, becoming the first ETF to ever accumulate $80 billion in assets in 374 days (the previous record was held by Vanguard’s S&P 500 product, VOO, which took five times longer to reach that milestone).
Bitcoin isn’t going at it alone. Other cryptocurrencies like XLM, XRP and ADA are rising nicely, as are DeFi tokens and memecoins. OG coins like TRX, BCH, LTC, however, are moving very little. SOL and BNB haven’t benefited from the surge either. As for crypto stocks, gains have been rather mild. On the stablecoin side, the continuous supply growth of USDT and USDC seems to indicate that the rally is backed by strong liquidity.
I love green candles as much as any man, but we do have reason to curb our enthusiasm. It’s not necessarily a crypto catalyst propelling BTC to new highs so much as the U.S. dollar being weak, CoinDesk senior analyst James Van Straten argued. The digital asset has yet to make new highs against gold, benchmark equity indexes like the S&P 500 or Nasdaq, or the British pound.
