Bitcoin (BTC-USD) on Monday surged above $72,000, a new all-time high, but that’s far from the peak expected by some who track the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Lender Standard Chartered anticipates bitcoin will reach $100,000 by the end of the year. Research firm Fundstrat has a target range of $116,000 to $137,000. Hedge fund SkyBridge predicts $170,000 by April 2025.
“People think we’re nuts and that’s fine, but I don’t think we’re nuts and that’s why we have such a big position,” Anthony Scaramucci, founder and CEO of SkyBridge Capital, told Yahoo Finance Live.
Some on Wall Street say it is quite difficult to estimate the future price of bitcoin because it has no intrinsic value, and most big firms with large research arms are currently staying away from setting targets. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon has likened it to a “pet rock.”
“Bitcoin is like art,” said a Wall Street research analyst who requested anonymity. “There’s no way to come up with a target.”
That hasn’t stopped other financial firms from trying — and setting the price significantly higher than it is today. 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 that received approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission in January to launch a new spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
VanEck recently scrapped its $80,000 target for 2024 as bitcoin began hitting new all-time highs in the past week. However, the firm’s “medium-term” target of $350,000 still holds.
“We are in unchartered territory,” Matthew Sigel, head of VanEck’s digital assets research, told Yahoo Finance by email.
Another money manager that received approval to launch a bitcoin ETF, Ark Invest, has thrown out a long-term bull case estimate of more than $1.3 million per coin in the next decade.
Ark’s director of digital assets, Yassine Elmandjra, acknowledged such a lofty projection may seem “absurd.”
His reasoning is that bitcoin will rise in value as its various use cases add to the eventual 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 greater share in global payments, he said.
Demand, Elmandjra added, is key to evaluating how high the price could go.
Wall Street strategists often project out future prices for a stock using a company’s earnings per share —based on the company’s growth strategy— multiplied by the valuation investors will be willing to pay for the stock.
“Earnings per share, you’re going to look at an equity balance sheet,” Elmandjra said. “Here [with bitcoin], you’re going to look at, okay, what is the demand to hold an unseasonable strictly 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 pulled in billions since their launches in January.
The new ETFs have been purchasing a daily average of 4,000 coins since their January launch through Thursday, according to Mark Connors, head of research for crypto asset manager 3iQ.
That is considerably more than the 900 coins being created daily by the bitcoin network.
More supply problems are expected for bitcoin this year in light of the “halving” estimated to occur sometime between April 19 and 20. After that next cut the daily supply of new coins will be 450 instead of 900.
Connors’s firm has a base target for bitcoin to reach $110,000 in 2024 and $140,000 the next year.
It also has a more ambitious prediction. In that case, bitcoin gets to $180,000 this year and $450,000 in 2025.
