No one has ever lost money buying bitcoin.” While bitcoin BTCUSD +1.98% evangelist Michael Saylor’s claim may not be strictly true, the inexorable rise of the cryptocurrency continues and the milestones keep coming. Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $111,000 in overnight trading Thursday, taking its rally in 2025 past 18%.
Although its gains fall short of those registered by gold, up 26% so far in 2025, its performance far outstrips that of the S&P 500, and its growing emergence as a legitimate asset and store of value has seen its market capitalization exceed $2 trillion.
Putting this in perspective, only four stocks in the U.S — Microsoft MSFT -1.22% , Alphabet GOOG +2.87% , Apple AAPL -2.31% and Nvidia NVDA -1.92% — exceed it.
The explanation for bitcoin’s steepening rally is multi-faceted but momentum explains much of it. For all the institutional adoption of bitcoin in the last year or so, triggered by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of a Bitcoin ETF in January 2024, trading is still dominated by retail investors who follow the impetus of rising prices. In May alone, bitcoin ETFs have sucked in a record $3.6 billion of inflows.
