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First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Rises to Nearly $70K After Trump's BTC 2024 Speech
The latest price moves in crypto markets in context for July 29, 2024.
Updated Jul 29, 2024, 12:07 p.m. Published Jul 29, 2024, 12:07 p.m.
This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter, putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
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Bitcoin (BTC) climbed to nearly $70,000 at the start of the European morning, its highest since early June, as the crypto market rallied after Donald Trump's appearance at BTC 2024 in Nashville on Saturday. The Republican candidate for the presidency revealed plans to build a strategic BTC reserve if he is elected in November. Bitcoin is currently trading at around $69,650, an increase of 2.5% in the last 24 hours. The broader digital asset market has risen by about 3%, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index, with bitcoin cash (BCH) leading the gains, adding more than 15% to $453.
Donald Trump pledged to "never sell" the U.S. government's seized bitcoin, in addition to announcing his intention to maintain a "strategic national bitcoin reserve," in his speech at BTC 2024. "If we don't do it, China will do it," he said of embracing digital assets. Crypto is "the steel industry of 100 years ago, you're just in your infancy," he said. "One day it probably will overtake gold." He added that Democrats keeping the White House would be a disaster for crypto. "If they win this election, every one of you will be gone." If elected, Trump said his day one plans included firing Gary Gensler, the influential chair of the SEC, who is widely reviled in the crypto industry. The promise drew huge applause from the crowd. "I didn't know he was that unpopular," Trump said.
COMP, the native token of the lending protocol Compound, dropped over 6% as the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that runs the protocol suffered a possible "governance attack." A governance attack occurs when an attacker acquires enough voting power in a DAO to manipulate the protocol for personal gain, exploiting the permissionless and tradable nature of governance tokens. The attack on Compound involved a series of coordinated efforts to manipulate the platform’s decision-making process through significant COMP token delegations led by a whale named Humpy, who sought to allocate $24 million worth of COMP to a yield-bearing protocol he controlled called goldCOMP run by a group known as Golden Boys. The group has made multiple attempts, with the latest attempt finally passing.
Chart of the Day
- Bitcoin has finally surpassed resistance of the trendline connecting March and April highs.
- The breakout could entice momentum traders, opening doors for new lifetime highs.
- Source: TradingView
- Omkar Godbole
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Jamie Crawley
Jamie joined CoinDesk as a news reporter in February 2021 after writing widely about crypto and blockchain for two years in other roles. Away from crypto, Jamie runs a lot and loves all things sport. He holds small amounts of BTC, ETH, ADA and LTC.
Omkar Godbole
Omkar Godbole is a Co-Managing Editor on CoinDesk's Markets team based in Mumbai, holds a masters degree in Finance and a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) member. Omkar previously worked at FXStreet, writing research on currency markets and as fundamental analyst at currency and commodities desk at Mumbai-based brokerage houses. Omkar holds small amounts of bitcoin, ether, BitTorrent, tron and dot.
