Bitcoin’s Trump Bump | Stripe Makes Big Crypto Play

Election betting could go mainstream in the U.S., as Kalshi triumphs over the CFTC.

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Nina Bambysheva Staff Writer, Forbes Money & Markets
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Steven Ehrlich Director, Forbes Digital Assets
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STRIPE WANTS IN ON STABLECOINS

If completed, the deal to buy Bridge would be the largest in Stripe’s history at $70 billion. It also comes after the company reentered the crypto industry after a multiyear absence. After first accepting crypto payments in 2014, the firm stopped in 2018 due to technical difficulties and high transaction rates. Stripe only restarted them in October. Acquiring the startup would provide a backbone for the company to venture more deeply into stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to another currency or financial instrument. Such coins, which include Tether, USDC and Dai, carried a collective market cap of more than $170 billion, per Forbes’ Digital Assets live tracker.

Bridge, which offers software to enable businesses to accept cross-border payments made with stablecoins, has processed more than $5 billion in annualized payment volume, according to a blog post by investor Sequoia in August. It counts government departments like the U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury and companies like SpaceX and Coinbase among its customers. However, it still has a long way to usurp industry incumbents. For example, 2023 Visa processed 212.6 billion transactions worth $12.3 trillion.

TRUMP BUMP RAISES HOPES FOR ANOTHER UPTOBER

October has often been a bullish month for bitcoin and the rest of the crypto industry, and it looks like history is repeating itself. Bitcoin is up 12.8% this month, and its current price of $68,885 is its highest since July. Without an immediate obvious catalyst, the likely cause of this push is growing expectations of a Donald Trump victory in the presidential election next month.

According to Polymarket, investors are placing a 60% likelihood of his retaking the White House (even if most nationwide polls see a much closer race). Nevertheless, this probability returns his odds to where they were on July 21, when President Biden gave way to Kamala Harris in the campaign. Odds on Polymarket have also raised the likelihood of a Republican sweep of Congress to 40%, which is also the highest that they have been since Biden withdrew. A unified government could benefit crypto in 2025 by making the passage of key legislation that would regulate stablecoins and settle turf wars between the SEC and CFTC more likely.

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CURRENT PRICE OF TOP 5 COINS (7-Day % Change)

Coin

Price

Percent Change

Bitcoin (BTC)

$68,885

11.4%

Ether (ETH)

$2,661

9.4%

Tether (USDT)

$1.00

0.0%

Binance Coin (BNB)

$569

5.8%

Solana (SOL)

$156

8.3%

Sources: Forbes Digital Assets, CoinGecko. Prices as of 2:30 p.m. on October 18, 2024.

SEC TWITTER HACKER BROUGHT TO JUSTICE

On October 17, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Eric Council Jr., 25, for hacking and then unlawfully posting a fake spot bitcoin ETF approval message in January on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s X account. He allegedly gained access to the account via a SIM swap attack, whereby a hacker tricks a phone carrier into assigning a telephone number to a new device. Council is charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.

The post immediately caused some volatility in bitcoin’s price. Due to the massive hype surrounding the expected launch of spot bitcoin ETFs, which would go on to have the most successful debuts in history and today hold more than $60 billion in assets under management, the price initially surged more than $1,000. After they regained access to the account and deleted the post, the price fell $2,000. The hack was also an embarrassing episode for the SEC, when the Twitter security team revealed it did not have two-factor authentication set up as a safeguard for the account, which has 754,000 followers.

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