On Monday, the price of Bitcoin surpassed $31,300 — the highest level in the first six months of 2023, bringing the asset’s gain for the year to about 89%.

Bitcoin ( BTC ) is up more than 2% on the day as a combination of bullish factors play out for the cryptocurrency — from the banking crisis to the recent institutional adoption narrative in the form of spot Bitcoin ETF filings.

Andrew Lawrence, co-founder and CEO of on-chain custody solution Censo Inc., said the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX created a lot of “forced selling” that might not have otherwise occurred, creating a market bottom of sorts.

“So, in some ways, the rise of BTC since then has to do, in part, with mean reversion,” he told Blockworks.

But more importantly, a series of bank failures that began in March have raised concerns about the safety of deposits. Some people are turning to Bitcoin as a “bearer asset hedge,” Lawrence said.

Industry watchers say the involvement of some of the biggest names in financial services in the asset class has also boosted broader institutional adoption, which has been bullish.

Roman Regelman, CEO of BNY Mellon’s asset servicing and digital business, said in May that the nation’s oldest bank would expand its service offerings to include digital asset custody and clearing.

The executive said at the time that BNY Mellon would use blockchain technology to modernize its infrastructure and explore tokenization.

Cryptocurrency exchange EDX Markets launched last month with support from Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets and Charles Schwab.

The launch comes around the same time that Deutsche Bank applied to Germany’s financial regulator to offer cryptocurrency custody services. The European Parliament passed the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation in April.

Also in June, BlackRock, which manages $9 trillion in assets, decided to try its first attempt at launching a spot Bitcoin ETF. This prompted other fund issuers — including Fidelity Investments, Invesco and WisdomTree — to renew their pursuit of spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Despite multiple attempts over the past decade, the SEC has never allowed such a product to enter the market.

In the week following BlackRock’s filing, Bitcoin rallied more than 15%, topping $31,000 on June 23, Matteo Greco, research analyst at Fineqia International, wrote in a June 27 research note.

But industry observers say another upcoming event could have an even bigger impact on bitcoin’s price.

“I suspect … we won’t see the real fireworks we’ve seen in this industry until the next Bitcoin halving, which will probably start in the second quarter of next year,” Lawrence said.

The block reward is halved (the reward for mining a new block is split in half) every 210,000 blocks, or about four years. The next Bitcoin halving is scheduled for April 2024.

“Historically, the months leading up to the halving are the start of a bullish trend in the market,” Greco told Blockworks in an email. “Therefore, market participants are carefully looking at the second half of 2023.”