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 🏁 On your marks

Election Day in America is finally here. 

This morning, Donald Trump is leading on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. And if we’re looking at the good ol’ data and polls from places like 538, then the odds are pretty even. 

We’re in wait-and-see mode until tonight after the polls close and we can start seeing how voters, well, voted. 

The overall crypto market’s stuck in wait-and-see mode too, according to GSR research analyst Toe Bautista. But the good news is that he thinks that bitcoin is “bulletproof” from whoever wins. 

In fact, it seems unlikely that we’ll see a solid rally once a winner is announced. If anything, there could be a small move if there’s a Trump win, according to analysts.

However, from an altcoin perspective, Bautista pointed out that a lot of firms have been in the wings, biding their time to see what happens to other token launches, and how the election plays out. 

“Nobody really wants to launch, and there's not a whole lot of capital that wants to deploy when you don't know if the company you're going to be deploying at is going to get sued by the SEC in two months. And so … rather directionally, a Trump win … if you have…this bell curve of outcomes at least cuts off your left curve of insane risk, where Gary Gensler goes scorched earth on crypto, kind of what he's been doing over the past two years,” Bautista said.

“If you can cut out that side of your outcome, then your expected value is much higher,” he continued, adding that it’s really only a scenario that plays out if Trump wins…and keeps to his former promise of somehow removing SEC chair Gary Gensler from his office. Though, I’ll note that our very own Casey Wagner isn’t so sure it’ll be easy for Trump to fire Gensler. 

Bautista joins Empire’s Jason Yanowitz in saying that carving out an all-time high in the fourth quarter is a big ask though Bautista isn’t going to discount a potential move to $80,000. 

It’s also not stopping him from looking ahead to the first and second quarters of next year. If the macro conditions hold and remain favorable, it’s likely to push bitcoin higher. 

“It’s very easy to see a world in which bitcoin goes to $80,000 whether that’s Q1 or by the end of the month, your guess is really as good as mine,” he told me (but his guess is definitely better than mine). Bautista is really focused on the direction of crypto, and he said that’s when we’ll see the action.

Price targets, shmice targets. Let’s see how today’s election plays out.

— Katherine Ross

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• BTC slipped to $66,850 overnight, down 9% from seven-month highs at the end of October. (Current price: $68,680.)

• Trump parody memecoins are down between 20% and 30% over the past week. Unofficial Kamala memecoin KAMA has otherwise jumped by 43%.

• Latest Polymarket odds: Trump with 62.3%, Harris with 37.9%. On Kalshi, Trump leads with 57%.

• Total Polymarket volumes are at all-time high, per Blockworks Research data: $161.2 million on Monday, topping November 1st’s $160.9 million. (The Polymarket dashboard is open to the public!)

• Open interest on Polymarket’s two largest election markets stands at a combined $326.7 million, per this Dune dashboard, also a new record.

🧙‍♂️ Yer a bitcoin wizard, Harry

Harry Potter ran headfirst into a brick wall at Platform 9¾ to transcend into the Wizarding World.

We’re about to do something similar with bitcoin.

This is it. After the next few days, there are no more immediate catalysts and prophecies to fulfill.

1. The Bitcoin halving: The network cut issuance in half almost exactly 200 days ago. Cycle-maxis predicted it would inevitably lead to a supply shock one year later, as is tradition.

2. US election: Always occurs six-to-eight months after the halving — and the past two elections have preceded a full bitcoin send to all-time highs.

Bitcoin rallied from $720 to nearly $20,000 in the 400 or so days after Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. That’s over 27x in a little over a year.

BTC then went 4.2x — from $16,300 to $69,000— in the year following Biden’s win in 2020.

Brainiacs would, however, quickly point out that only two or three halving-election cycles tells us nothing statistically significant about anything. 

Bitcoin’s massive rallies over the years are then just price discovery. And perhaps, elections and halvings are less significant than the global liquidity cycle, for instance (which, coincidentally, is headed for an uptrend!)

While the global liquidity prophecy plays out over the longer-term, Trump’s odds on Polymarket have been tipped as an immediate driver of bitcoin’s price.

The chart above maps the price of bitcoin (the area in green) to Trump’s odds on Polymarket, in orange. The shaded purple areas indicate when Trump’s odds and BTC/USD were correlated.

They only align about half the time, which probably says they’re not really correlated at all. Although, the two have closely tracked each other since early October.

Still, we’re in uncharted territory. Bitcoin hit all-time high before the halving this time around, an apparent anomaly in the cycle prophecy — just like The Boy Who Lived. 

— David Canellis

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• Mt. Gox moved $2.2 billion of bitcoin to an unmarked wallet addresses on Monday, per Arkham Intelligence data.

• Anchorage, Kraken, Robinhood, and Paxos were among the crypto firms that teamed up to launch the Global Dollar, a regulation-focused stablecoin.

• A16z pledged $23 million to Fairshake for the 2026 midterms. 

• OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer teased a “new” OpenSea in a post on X. 

• Chainlink, UBS Asset Management and Swift completed a pilot showing how institutions can use Swift’s infrastructure to bridge tokenized assets.

Q: Will we get a presidential-elect before the day’s over?

Oof. This is a hard one. 

I’m on the fence, if we’re being honest. With data showing how close the odds are, I’m inclined to think we’re going to get a similar situation to the 2020 election, which took a few days to officially call.

For the sake of our team's sleep schedules — and the markets — I’d like to see a winner announced tonight or tomorrow, but as I said above, we’re really just stuck in the wait-and-see mode until then. 

Fun, right?

— Katherine Ross

I suspect we’ll see a few audacious calls from the likes of Associated Press and Fox News, but the devil’s in the details.

Given the significance of Pennsylvania for both candidates, it’s important to remember that ballot-counters there aren’t legally allowed to start tallying votes — including the early-arriving ones — until today. They’ve got millions of votes to process, so, yeah, it might take a while.

Will we get a definite answer? Maybe. Will one candidate (or both) claim victory before then? Almost definitely.

— Michael McSweeney