In summary
- Just days after the first debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Polymarket’s odds have shifted to show Harris advancing.
- Cryptocurrency bettors favor Harris to win the 2024 Presidential Election by a narrow margin, 50% to Trump’s 49%, according to Polymarket.
- Geoff Kendrick, global head of cryptocurrency research at Standard Chartered, believes Bitcoin will hit a new all-time high price this year, regardless of who wins the election.
Just days after former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris faced off in their first debate, Polymarket odds have shifted to show Harris moving ahead. However, an analyst at British multinational bank Standard Chartered believes Bitcoin will hit a new all-time high (ATH) price this year, regardless of who wins the election.
At the time of writing, cryptocurrency bettors favor Democratic candidate Harris to win the 2024 Presidential Election in November by a slim margin, 50% to Republican rival Trump’s 49%, according to odds from Polymarket.
Still, the election is 52 days away, and crypto bettors on the decentralized prediction market have overwhelmingly favored Trump since February. It’s also worth noting that US citizens are banned from using Polymarket. It’s true that some US voters have likely found ways to access it with VPN services, but many people betting on the election are likely not registered as US voters.
But for what it’s worth, most traditional polls have shown Harris outperforming Trump for a while now.
The cryptocurrency betting site also shows Harris making gains in two key states: Michigan and Wisconsin, where Polymarket now rates her with a 58% chance of taking the states’ combined 25 electoral votes.
Source: Polymarket
The vice president is now very close to flipping Nevada, which would give her six additional electoral votes. But Harris, who only joined the race in July when President Joe Biden dropped out, is still significantly behind in three other key states: Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, which total 46 electoral votes.
Many analysts have been saying that a second term for Trump would be beneficial for Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry in general. But Geoff Kendrick, global head of cryptocurrency research at Standard Chartered, is not convinced that the difference would be that stark.
“First, we believe that progress on relaxing regulations, particularly the repeal of SAB 121, which imposes strict accounting rules on banks’ digital asset holdings, will continue in 2025 no matter who is in the White House; it would simply be slower under a Harris presidency,” he wrote in a note shared with Decrypt.
He added that while the election result remains relevant for crypto markets, it is now less so than before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
The bank now predicts that Bitcoin will hit an all-time high before the end of the year, regardless of who wins: $125,000 in the event of a Trump victory and $75,000 if Harris wins.
“A Harris win would likely trigger an initial price decline,” Kendrick wrote, “but we would expect dips to be bought as the market recognizes that progress on the regulatory front will continue to come, and as other positive drivers take hold.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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