Bitcoin Briefly Tops $68K as Biden Dropout Riles Up Crypto Bulls

Bitcoin (BTC) briefly rose above $68,000, before falling to $67,500, at the start of Asian trading hours Monday as bullish sentiment largely rose among traders driven by a favorable U.S. election outlook.

Majors rose higher driven by BTC strength. Ether (ETH) briefly crossed $3,500, Cardano’s ADA and Solana’s SOL added as much as 5%, while dogecoin (DOGE) jumped more than 8% before paring gains.

The broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a liquid index that tracks the largest crypto tokens, minus stablecoins, rose 1.25%.

BTC gains started late Sunday, as incumbent U.S. president Joe Biden said in an X post that he would not contest the upcoming November elections. However, this dropped the odds Republican candidate Donald Trump from Sunday’s 71% to 65% in Asian morning hours Monday on the crypto betting application Polymarket. Meanwhile, odds of sitting Vice President Kamala Harris rose from 16% to 30%.

“Biden’s withdrawal has opened up a possibility where, regardless of who sits in the White House, the U.S. government embrace a more constructive stance towards the digital asset industry after November,” Singapore-based crypto research firm Presto shared in a Monday note to CoinDesk.

“Whether Harris or any other contenders will pursue such a path remains to be seen, but the optionality that hardly existed before is now there,” Presto added. Trump’s favorable view of cryptocurrencies has attracted massive support from industry players in the past months.

He is slated to appear at the Bitcoin 2024 conference later this week in Nashville, a move that has furthered sentiment among market watchers. “We would expect the market to rally higher as Trump's key economic policy would be a lower interest rate and cheaper borrowing costs.

This would surely boost all risky assets, including BTC,” shared Lucy Hu, senior analyst at Metalpha, in a Telegram message. “In the mid-long term till the 2025 election, we would expect BTC to continue to rally,” Hu added.