And Anthony Georgiades of Innovating Capital shares his long-term outlook for the digital currency.

Welcome to CNBC's Crypto World.

I'm Brandon Gomez.

Bitcoin notching yet another milestone after it crossed the highly anticipated $100,000 threshold overnight.

Bitcoin's new record high stands at $103,844.

It's another high point in a major year for the cryptocurrency, which kicked off with the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. back in January, then the halving in April, and of course, an explosion in attention during the 2024 election.

President-elect Trump became a friend of the industry, meeting with executives and campaigning on crypto as an issue.

Reacting to the $100,000 milestone, Trump posted on congratulating Bitcoiners and saying, quote, you're welcome.

Bitcoin also notched its new record the same day Trump publicly announced his pick to lead the SEC, former agency commissioner Paul Atkins.

If confirmed, he will succeed current chair Gary Gensler, who's led multiple major enforcement actions against the crypto industry, and who said he'd step down on Inauguration Day.

Also yesterday, comments made by Fed Chair Powell may have given Bitcoin a slight push.

He told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook Summit that the central bank is limited in its ability to regulate Bitcoin, and that the currency does not compete against the U.S. dollar.

Instead, it competes with gold.

Now looking at where prices stand as of noon Eastern, Bitcoin dipped from its earlier high and traded at $101,100.

Ether and XRP joined the rally, gaining around 4 and 2 percent respectively.

Memecoin is also reacting to Bitcoin's move higher, with both Doge and Shiba Inu up around 4 percent.

And crypto-focused stocks opened higher relative to broader markets this morning, but as of midday, gave back those gains.

All right, for our main story, CryptoWorld's Jordan Smith spoke with Anthony Georgiades, the founder and general partner at Innovating Capital, just before Bitcoin's jump above the $100K mark.

Georgiades shares what he thinks is driving the crypto rally and where memecoins fit in the current market cycle.

What do you make of this range we seem to be in, whether we're poised for a breakout in either direction in the near term?

Yeah, I mean, if you look at the kind of post-election cycle, it's a little interesting.

It seems as though a lot of individuals, myself included, were anticipating a little bit of a buy the rumor, sell the news type event, you know, obviously with the markets leading up to the election, seemingly perfectly pricing in obviously both the outcome and what a Trump win would entail from really much more regulatory certainty.

We're already seeing it.

You know, we're seeing changes to really the SEC landscape.

We're seeing changes to Congress and legislation with regards to how we're going to really establish clear-cut frameworks.

We're seeing a tremendous amount of support and adoption for crypto at both the enterprise and legislative level, obviously with some of the ETF approvals and those we've seen there.

I think the market, you know, is generally reacting in a choppy fashion right now.

There's obviously still some time to go.

There's still a lot of hurdles to get through.

Very cautiously optimistic within these price ranges.

And I think obviously, you know, in the short term, what it'll really take to see a significant breakthrough past these levels is really the broader market thesis actually playing out and being executed on establishing clear-cut frameworks, seeing legislation pass through and seeing some of that more institutionalized adoption pan out.

Look at micro-strategies, you know, pricing, obviously to perfection, trading at multiples of a premium over its book value of Bitcoin itself.

So there's still some choppiness and frothiness out there.

But, you know, I think time will tell, obviously.

And as things pan out, the market will continue to price things properly.

I'm obviously very, very, very bullish medium term and long term.

Yeah.

You brought up something there about institutional adoption.

And I was wondering how much of the price action we're seeing right now is driven by institutions.

You know, we've long talked about how after FTX retail investors were skittish around crypto, institutions were still questioning whether they were going to get in.

And now after Bitcoin ETFs especially, you have a lot of buying on the institutional side.

But are you seeing any signs that retail investors are driving some of the action we saw post-election?

Or is it all about institutions right now?

Well, if you look back into November, right, I mean, that was just groundbreaking.

Almost $8 billion of net inflows in a single month to Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs.

Right.

And I think, obviously, you know, the post-election momentum is really driving that adoption.

And, you know, you're seeing very, very, very steady growth month over month, really trailing back to the start of this year.

This obviously suggests much more kind of a maturing market overall in terms of, you know, it's really kind of a change in the tide in terms of this constant institutional flow.

Keep in mind, though, typically when we've looked at cycles and where the retail investor comes into play is really the bull market cycle inflows away from Bitcoin and Ethereum and into a lot of the more altcoins.

You know, we're seeing it with Ripple.

We're seeing it with a bunch of coins on the market, you know, from Hedera to Avalanche, whatever it might be.

So I think it's kind of a twofold effect.

Obviously, the institutional inflows that lead to some of the price ascension of the top blue chips, Bitcoin and Ethereum, kind of set the path for a lot of this altcoin bull market run overall from retail players and institutional players alike.

You talk about altcoins.

I think the other thing that comes to mind for a lot of people who are on the retail side and maybe crypto curious are these meme coins.

You know, we saw a spike in Dogecoin after the idea of the Department of Government and Efficiency, Elon Musk being involved.

Does this cycle feel different when it comes to meme coins?

Because when you go back to 2021, there was a lot of hype around less about utility and more around FOMO.

Does it feel the same way this time around, given the rush into these tokens just around news related to politics or whatever else and less about utility?

I have had multiple people this cycle tell me that the first crypto coin that they ever bought was Dogecoin, you know, several weeks ago.

It does feel a little different, but it's the same in a lot of ways, right?

You had obviously, you know, back in 2017, a rush into ICOs, obviously 2021, you know, rush into NFTs and a variety of different projects.

And, you know, now the meme coin craze has always been there.

It's just heightened at these levels.

And, you know, when you see obviously these overnight successes and let's be clear, right, there are hundreds of thousands of meme coins out there, right?

Different smart contracts and different tokens that have been launched and only a few have really seen success.

But just keep in keep in mind one thing with meme coins overall, and most of them advertise it, if you go to like literally, you know, memecoin.com or whatever, you know, they market there's no, there's no utility, there's no intrinsic value.

This token is not worth, you know, potentially anything, right?

So when you're talking about meme coins, it's the really most kind of perfect on ramp for non crypto natives that may have some skepticism on crypto overall, but you know, want to onboard and learn about the space a little bit more.

If a token doesn't have, you know, any quote unquote, fundamental utility around it, then you can look at price in one of two ways.

It's either nothing or it's infinity, right?

You don't have necessarily the utility of let's say Ethereum that's generating gas fees or has dap growth on the platform.

And you can back into some sort of underlying token value based on, you know, discounted analyses with regards to what the economic rent might be associated from fees and things like that.

When that doesn't exist in the meme coin market, right, the expectation is, you know, infinite.

And so you have a lot of the speculative FOMO into these tokens.

Obviously, it can be very, very dangerous.

And, you know, you can lose effectively everything.

But at the same time, it's easy for people to understand and to conceptualize.

There's a lot of social proof around meme coins and really a lot of kind of community hacking that goes into those things.

I personally don't participate in meme coins whatsoever, but I do understand their importance and why they have a place in this market.

And, you know, more than anything, I do see it as overall positive engagement in terms of onboarding new community members.

Okay, that's all for Crypto World today.

We're back again tomorrow.

We'll see you then.