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Bitcoin at $350,000? Bulls say the current rally is just the beginning.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) rose above $72,000 on Monday, a new all-time high, but that’s far from the peak expected by some who follow the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Lender Standard Chartered predicts bitcoin will reach $100,000 by the end of the year. Research firm Fundstrat has a target of $116,000 to $137,000. Hedge fund SkyBridge expects $170,000 by April 2025.
To know more: Is it a good time to invest in bitcoin?
“People think we’re crazy and that’s fine, but I don’t think we’re crazy and that’s why we have such a strong position,” Anthony Scaramucci, founder and CEO of SkyBridge Capital, told Yahoo Finance Live.
Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital, which owns some bitcoin, expects it to reach a price of $170,000 by April 2025. (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images) (PATRICK T. FALLON via Getty Images)
Some on Wall Street say it is quite difficult to estimate the future price of bitcoin because it has no intrinsic value and most large companies with large research arms currently stay away from setting targets. JP Morgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon compared it to a “pet rock.”
“Bitcoin is like art,” said a Wall Street research analyst who requested anonymity. “There is no way to locate a target.”
This hasn’t stopped other financial companies from trying and setting a significantly higher price than the current one. Some of the companies making these predictions also sell products that provide investors with exposure to the digital asset.
One is VanEck, among the money managers who received approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission in January to launch a new bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
VanEck recently scrapped his $80,000 target for 2024 as bitcoin began hitting new all-time highs last week. However, the company’s “medium-term” goal of $350,000 still stands.
“We are in uncharted territory,” Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck, told Yahoo Finance via email.
Another money manager that has received approval to launch a bitcoin ETF, Ark Invest, has floated a long-term bullish estimate of more than $1.3 million per coin over the next decade.
Ark’s director of digital assets, Yassine Elmandjra, acknowledged that such an ambitious projection may seem “absurd”.
His reasoning is that bitcoin will increase in value as its various use cases add to the final size of the digital asset’s market value. Bitcoin can be a “store of value” independent of central banks and governments, serve as a hedge against inflation and potentially take a bigger share in global payments, he said.
Demand, Elmandjra added, is key to assessing how high the price could go.
Wall Street strategists often project a stock’s future prices using a company’s earnings per share, based on the company’s growth strategy, multiplied by the valuation that investors will be willing to pay for the stock.
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“Earnings per share, you will look at an equity balance sheet,” Elmandjra said. “Here [with bitcoin]you’re going to look at, okay, what’s the demand for holding an unusually scarce, digitally native asset.”
Right now, demand for bitcoin is clearly greater than supply thanks largely to the trading of 11 new spot bitcoin ETFs that have raised billions since their launch in January.
According to Mark Connors, head of research for crypto asset manager 3iQ, the new ETFs bought a daily average of 4,000 coins from their January launch through Thursday.
This is far more than the 900 coins created every day by the Bitcoin network.
Further supply issues for bitcoin are expected this year in light of the estimated “halving” that will occur between April 19th and 20th. After the next denomination, the daily supply of new coins will be 450 instead of 900.
Connors’ firm has a base target for bitcoin to reach $110,000 in 2024 and $140,000 the following year.
He also has a more ambitious forecast. If that happens, bitcoin will hit $180,000 this year and $450,000 in 2025.
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