Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 for the first time in December 2024, driven by a combination of spot ETF inflows, the April halving and improving macroeconomic conditions. The rally has drawn comparisons to 2017 and 2021, but the structure of the market is fundamentally different. This time, the buyers are not retail traders on Coinbase — they are pension funds, endowments and sovereign wealth funds.
The launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States in January 2024 was the watershed moment. Eleven ETFs, including products from BlackRock, Fidelity and ARK Invest, began trading simultaneously after a decade of SEC rejections. The result was historic: BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) became the fastest-growing ETF in history, accumulating $10 billion in assets in its first month and over $40 billion by mid-2025. Total spot Bitcoin ETF assets under management crossed $100 billion in March 2025. The inflows are not purely speculative: pension funds including the State of Wisconsin Investment Board and several major university endowments have publicly disclosed Bitcoin ETF holdings, representing the first meaningful institutional allocation to digital assets.
The April 2024 halving — Bitcoin’s programmatic reduction of the block reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC — reduced the daily supply of newly minted Bitcoin from approximately 900 coins to 450. Combined with ETF-driven demand, the supply-demand dynamics have been powerfully bullish. Historically, Bitcoin has rallied in the 12-18 months following each of its three previous halvings (2012, 2016, 2020), a pattern that has held so far in this cycle.
But there are new risks. The concentration of Bitcoin in ETF custody — primarily Coinbase, which acts as custodian for most spot ETFs — creates a single point of failure that did not exist in previous cycles. Regulatory risk, while diminished, has not disappeared: the SEC’s posture could shift with a change in administration, and the EU’s MiCA regulation, which takes full effect in 2025, imposes significant compliance obligations on crypto service providers. The Bitcoin market of 2025 is larger, more liquid and more institutional than at any point in its history. That brings stability — but also new vectors for systemic risk.