Why is Bitcoin going up — and how high could it go?

April 2025 was ghastly for stock market investors. US President Donald Trump's “Liberation Day” tariff announcements on April 2 contributed to existing negative market sentiment, sharply decreasing the major stock indices. From Apr 2–7, the market's two primary performance indicators, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite indices, experienced 13% drops, some of the worst results in decades. However, The April shock wasn't a one-off event: the nervousness and losses in the market started in mid-February, mainly as a response to the new administration's drastic measures that ignited the fear of international tariff wars.

While the stock market is in disarray, Bitcoin (BTC) — the flag-bearer of the cryptocurrency market — is doing well. In fact, the world's leading crypto asset is 13.5% up on a monthly basis as of May 6, 2025 and continues to power on. So confident is the performance of the BTC crypto that it’s safely beaten the results posted by gold, the traditional safe-haven asset rising in times of trouble. Moreover, it’s looking like some investors are preferring to park their funds in Bitcoin — rather than gold — while the stock market is bleeding.

Why is Bitcoin rising? What supports this seemingly unexpected pattern? Will this phenomenon persist over a longer-term window? In this article, we set out to answer these questions. Some of the reasons we’ve identified might be familiar to those closely following financial news, but others may feature less prevalent narratives.

Key Takeaways:

• In April 2025, as US equities experienced a significant decline, Bitcoin rallied strongly, emerging as a new hedge against a bear market in stocks.

• Among the key reasons supporting Bitcoin’s new surge are a crypto-friendly political climate, rising institutional interest, appreciation of crypto as a store of value and potential safe-haven asset, limited highly liquid alternatives and its deflationary properties, such as block reward halving.