Bitcoin has rocketed over the last year, topping its previous all-time high as Tesla billionaire Elon Musk makes a dramatic return to the front lines of crypto.
The bitcoin price has added around 350% since crashing to a recent low of $15,000 per bitcoin, largely thanks to a fleet of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) taking Wall Street by storm (though the huge bitcoin price rally has sparked fears the Biden administration could be plotting to "kill" bitcoin and crypto).
Now, after Coinbase revealed its backing BlackRock's "$5 trillion By 2030" game-changer, famed stock picker and bitcoin bull Cathie Wood has hiked her bitcoin price prediction—betting a coming bitcoin price surge will give bitcoin a market capitalization of $75 trillion by the end of the decade.
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BlackRock and Fidelity have led a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) earthquake over the last three ... [+]
"Last year we put out our bull case for bitcoin, it was $1.5 million," Wood, the chief executive of disruptive technology investor Ark, said on stage at the New York Bitcoin Investor Day conference it was reported by Business Insider.
"With this institutional green light that the SEC has provided, kicking and screaming though it did, the analysis we've done is that if institutional investors were to allocate a little more than 5% of their portfolios to bitcoin, as we think they will over time, that alone would add $2.3 million to the projection I just gave you," Wood said, referring to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) waving through almost a dozen spot bitcoin ETFs in January.
Wall Street giants BlackRock and Fidelity have emerged as the two largest of the new bitcoin ETF issuers, raking in assets under management of around $15 billion and $9 billion respectively. Wood's own Ark 21Shares bitcoin ETF now holds almost 40,000 bitcoin worth $2 billion on behalf of investors.
Wood's new bitcoin price prediction could see bitcoin hitting $3.8 million by 2030, a massive near-6,000% increase from the current bitcoin price of $65,000 and market cap of $1.2 trillion.
"We think [bitcoin] has miles to go," Wood said. "We're at the very beginning of really putting in place the financial ecosystem native to the internet and disintermediating all of the toll-takers."
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The bitcoin price has erased is losses from 2022 crash that wiped $2 trillion from the combined ... [+]
After a period of huge growth following their launch, the new spot bitcoin ETFs—including Grayscale's converted trust—saw outflows over four straight days this week, according to BitMex data, as the bitcoin price swung wildly due to traders trying to stay ahead of Federal Reserve interest rate cut expectations.
Meanwhile, traders are turning their attention to bitcoin's looming supply cut, known as a halving, that's set for April.
"Rather than solely attributing bitcoin's current fluctuations to the impending halving, we suggest a nuanced view, considering factors like spot bitcoin ETF flows, evolving miner profitability post-halving and general market psychology with high 'greed levels' on pretty much all fronts," Mikkel Morch, founder of the digital asset investment fund ARK36, said in emailed comments.
"With more bitcoin retracements potentially looming and historical patterns indicating potential turbulence, we advise investors to tread carefully while exploring opportunities amid the uncharted territory of the 2024 halving."
