Talk about timing.

Less than 24 hours before President Donald Trump was set to host a gala for crypto investors, the price of bitcoin hit a new all-time high — a confluence of events likely to bolster Trump’s reputation as a champion of digital assets even as the dinner has raised ethical concerns.

Around 12 p.m. Thursday, bitcoin’s price had settled at about $111,300. It hit an all-time high of $$111,875 at approximately 3:30 a.m., the crypto publication CoinDesk reported.

Trump is slated to preside over a dinner at his property outside Washington, D.C., on Thursday that will convene the top recent holders of his $TRUMP coin cryptocurrency.

More than 200 mostly anonymous crypto buyers, many of them from overseas, spent a total of $394 million on the so-called memecoin, with purchases ranging from $55,000 to $37.7 million, according to the blockchain analytics company Nansen.

The gala has been in the works for months — part of Trump’s push to both reward and continue to curry favor with the crypto crowd. It’s a group that gave millions to the president’s campaign and ended up as the largest single donor bloc during the 2024 electoral contest.

While some bitcoin backers have been left disappointed by the lack of commitment to purchasing the token on the open market as a means of backing a strategic reserve, Trump has reined in the aggressive regulatory enforcement of the crypto industry that was a hallmark of the Biden administration.

Yet even some longtime bitcoin investors were caught by surprise when Trump announced his $TRUMP coin on the eve of his inauguration. Even as its price has declined following an initial surge, Trump and his family pocketed millions from the coins’ sales.

Critics have decried the memecoin dinner as raising conflicts of interest, foreign-influence concerns and even constitutional issues. The top buyer, Justin Sun, is a Chinese national previously sought by U.S. law enforcement officials.

Trump has sidestepped these complaints. While $TRUMP coin is overseen by Trump’s private corporate organization, White House officials said in an earlier statement to NBC News, “The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself” through events like the dinner, and that he “only acts in the best interests of the American public.”

That appears to include an ongoing focus on the crypto sector. It comes as bitcoin’s price has surged amid renewed fears about the global economy and a worldwide government borrowing glut and subsequent sell-off in bonds.

For some, it’s made alternative assets like bitcoin more attractive.

Yet even as the token’s price scales new heights, there remains debate about whether it can truly serve as an effective hedge against broader market volatility.

With a handful of exceptional episodes, bitcoin’s price has in recent years tended to track those of other tech stocks — but with even wider price swings. It’s also been tightly correlated with Federal Reserve interest rate decisions: When the Fed has cut rates, bitcoin’s price has surged. When they’ve sought to keep rates higher, its price has declined.

These trends have run counter to the narrative pushed by some bitcoin backers that the cryptocurrency can serve as a hedge against inflation or an alternative to the U.S. dollar.

But the latest surge in bitcoin’s price has come even as many tech stocks and the broader S&P 500 have declined. Some of the lift has been bolstered by the passage of the GENIUS Act, which is designed to give official government approval to the issuance of privately backed digital tokens that help crypto exchanges process transactions.

While the bill is ostensibly tailored to address these so-called stablecoins, any increase in the pool of buyers naturally serves to support bitcoin’s price — and give renewed hope that the digital token can achieve a kind of escape velocity against almost any economic backdrop.

“It’s not going away, it’s going to be part of a lot of portfolios, even if it’s just 2-3%,” said Wedbush Securities finance group managing director Dan Ives. “It’s still a risky asset, but the deregulatory environment has changed the way people view crypto as an investment.”