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2022 was a tough year for cryptocurrencies. Over $1.3 trillion has disappeared from the market value. Also, the price of Bitcoin, the world’s largest digital coin, has fallen more than 60% of his.
From stablecoin project terraUSD to crypto exchange FTX, investors were caught off guard by a wave of industry disruptions and worsening macroeconomic conditions. Anyone who predicted the price of Bitcoin over the past year really missed the mark.
But now that 2023 has arrived, some market players are getting into price cut negotiations as this could prove to be another volatile year.
Interest rates are rising around the world, putting pressure on risky assets such as stocks and Bitcoin. Investors are also watching how his FTX case, which resulted in the company’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried being arrested in the Bahamas, will play out.
CNBC has compiled Bitcoin’s wildest price predictions for 2023.
Tim Draper: $250,000
Bitcoin bull Tim Draper is the most optimistic about Bitcoin in 2022, predicting the token will be worth $250,000 by the end of the year.
In November, the billionaire venture capitalist said it would extend its forecast timeline to mid-2023. Even after FTX collapses, he is confident the coin will hit the 250,000 milestone.
“With women controlling 80% of retail spending and only one-seventh of bitcoin wallets owned by women, I suspect the dam is about to break,” Draper said in an e-mail. told CNBC in an email.
Bitcoin would need to rise 1,400% to trade at that level.
Draper said there may be reason to suspect the market has bottomed out despite falling prices and drying up of trading volume.
“I think the 2024 halving will be positive,” he said.
A halving or halving is an event that occurs every four years when Bitcoin rewards to miners are halved. Some investors see it as a positive for Bitcoin’s price as it is putting pressure on supply. The next half-life he is scheduled for 2024.
Bitcoin miners, who use power-hungry machines to validate transactions and create new tokens, are being weighed down by low prices and rising energy costs.
These actors have amassed large amounts of digital currency and have become some of the largest sellers in the market. Most of the remaining selling pressure on Bitcoin should be removed as miners sell their holdings to pay off their debts.
Vijay Ayyar, vice president of corporate development at crypto exchange Luno, said this historically bodes well for Bitcoin.
“In previous bear markets, miner capitulation has usually been a big bottom,” Ayyar told CNBC. Either you need to turn off or sell more bitcoins to keep your business going.”
“If the market reaches a point where it has enough to absorb the selling pressure of this miner, we can assume that it is time to bottom out.”
Standard Chartered: $5,000
For some market participants, the worst is yet to come.
Standard Chartered said in a Dec. 5 research note that Bitcoin could fall to $5,000. One of the bank’s “surprises” list that the market is “undervaluing”, the forecast represents a 70% plunge from current prices.
Standard Chartered’s nightmare 2023 scenario sees “yields plummeting with tech stocks” and “bitcoin sales slowing but hurting,” said the bank’s head of global research. Eric Robertsen said.
“More and more cryptocurrency companies and exchanges find themselves with a lack of liquidity, leading to further bankruptcies and a breakdown in investor confidence in digital assets,” he added.
Robertsen said the scenario “has a non-zero chance of happening in the next 12 months” and is “well out of market consensus and our own baseline views.”
Mark Mobius: $10,000
Veteran investor Mark Moebius has been relatively successful in terms of price calls in 2022. In May, he predicted that Bitcoin would fall to $20,000 when it was trading above $28,000.
He said bitcoin will fall to $10,000 in 2022. That didn’t happen. But Mobius told CNBC that he’s sticking to the $10,000 price negotiations in 2023.
The investor, who made his name at Franklin Templeton Investments, told CNBC that his bearish case for Bitcoin stemmed from rising interest rates and a general tightening of monetary policy by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
“As interest rates rise, it becomes less attractive to hold or buy bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, because just holding the coin will not pay interest,” Mobius said in an email. rice field.
Carol Alexander: $50,000
University of Sussex professor Carol Alexander wasn’t far from her prediction that Bitcoin will fall to $10,000 in 2022.
Now she thinks cryptocurrencies could be set up for profit, but not for the reasons you’d expect.
According to Alexander, the catalyst would be an increase in dominoes from the fallout of FTX Fallout. She expects to reach
“In 2023, it will be a managed bull market, not a bubble, so the price won’t overshoot like it used to,” she told CNBC.
“We will see a month or two of stable trending prices interspersed with periods of range-bound and possibly a few short-term crashes.”
Alexander’s reasoning is that as traders strain and trading volumes evaporate, large holders known as “whales” are likely to step in to prop up the market. The richest 97 bitcoin wallet address accounts for 14.15% of the total supply, according to fintech firm River Financial.
Some investors have given up on predicting the Bitcoin price. For Antoni Trenchev, CEO of his crypto-lending platform Nexo, recent events are a sobering moment.
Bitcoin is on a “positive path” in early 2022, with increased institutional adoption, but “some major forces have interfered,” he said.
Trenchev once predicted that Bitcoin will peak at $100,000 by early 2023.
AJ Bell financial analyst Laith Khalaf suggests that attempts to predict the price of Bitcoin are futile.
“We may be talking here about this time next year. It could be $5,000 or $50,000. The market is very sentiment driven, so I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. He told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”