Bitcoin tops 0,000 as monster 2024 rally reaches new heights

Bitcoin tops $100,000 as monster 2024 rally reaches new heights

Published

12 months ago

December 5, 2024

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A neon sign indicates that Bitcoin is accepted inside the venue of the Paralelni Polis project, an organization combining art, social sciences and modern technology, in Prague, Czech Republic, on Friday, Jan. 5, 2024.

Milan Jaros | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The price of bitcoin soared past the long-awaited $100,000 benchmark for the first time ever late Wednesday evening.

The flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by more than 5% at $101,072.00, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier, it rose as high as $101,555.40.

The move came hours after President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate Paul Atkins as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a move viewed by the crypto community as being in keeping with his promise not just to replace Gary Gensler — who has become something of a villain in crypto for the agency’s regulation-by-enforcement approach to the industry under his leadership — but to set up a more supportive regulatory environment for the crypto industry more broadly.

In the same day, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said bitcoin is “just like gold only it’s virtual, it’s digital,” speaking at the DealBook conference. He further clarified that “people are not using it as a form of payment, or as a store of value” and that “it’s not a competitor for the dollar, it’s really a competitor for gold.”

It’s a day of celebration for longtime bitcoin investors, who have held on for dear life, or “HODL’d” through several of the cryptocurrency’s boom and bust cycles, during which government and financial institutions remained dismissive — and even hostile — toward the asset class.

That’s largely because of the cryptocurrency’s anti-establishment roots. The original idea for Bitcoin was proposed at the height of the 2008 financial crisis: a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” its founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote in the Bitcoin Whitepaper.

In recent years, however, the industry has demonstrated the value of bitcoin to much of the institutional investing world. BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco and others launched the first spot bitcoin ETFs at the beginning of this year — bitcoin’s “IPO” moment — and the growing demand for them by institutions has helped drive the price higher. In November, Rick Wurster, the incoming CEO of Charles Schwab, said the firm is preparing to enter spot crypto trading, pending regulatory changes expected in the next Trump administration.

“We’re witnessing a paradigm shift. After four years of political purgatory, bitcoin and the entire digital asset ecosystem are on the brink of entering the financial mainstream,” Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, told CNBC.

Bitcoin has been widely expected to reach the landmark $100,000 level since the U.S. presidential election. However, excited investors sent bitcoin closer to this mark much sooner than initially anticipated; it rose as high as $99,849.99 on Nov. 22. There is much hope that President-elect Donald Trump will deliver on several pro-crypto initiatives in the year ahead – including the establishment of a national strategic bitcoin reserve or stockpile, no taxes on crypto transactions and opening up the crypto public equity markets with more IPOs.

“Over the long term, I’m bullish,” Novogratz added. “It won’t be a straight line up, and investors should always consider taking gains off the table. But, with a pro-crypto administration about to take charge in the U.S., it’ll be hard for the rest of the world not to take notice.”

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Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

3 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: