2022 has been a disaster year for cryptocurrencies. From stablecoin project terraUSD to crypto exchange FTX, the price of bitcoin plunged 60%, wiping out more than $1.3 trillion in market value.
Will the cryptocurrency crash stop in 2023? How will the deteriorating macro environment affect the cryptocurrency market? Yes.0001 btc to usd? In the New Year, some investors are offering predictions for the future price of bitcoin.
Bitcoin bull Tim Draper predicted last year that bitcoin would be worth $250,000 by the end of 2022.
This is despite events such as the FTX crash. But Tim Draper is optimistic. In November, he predicted bitcoin would peak at $250,000 by mid-2023.
At its current price of $16,686, Bitcoin would need to rise 14 times to reach that level.
Women control 80 percent of retail spending, but currently only one in seven Bitcoin wallets are owned by women, and their investment potential has yet to be fully unlocked, Draper told the publication. And while Bitcoin prices are low and trading volumes dry up at the moment, there are reasons to suspect that the market has bottomed out.
Standard Chartered takes the opposite view. The bank gave a fairly conservative forecast for bitcoin's price in the face of a highly depressed 2023.
Standard Chartered Bank said in a Dec. 5 research report that bitcoin prices could fall another 70% to $5,000 by 2023.
Eric Robertsen, global head of research at Standard Chartered Bank, believes that while the bitcoin sell-off has slowed, the downside is in the cards. "More cryptocurrency companies and exchanges will be exposed to liquidity, more institutions will go bankrupt, and investor confidence in digital assets will collapse."
Eric believes that this black swan event, which greatly deviates from market expectations, could occur within the next year.
Veteran investor Mark Mobius made a relatively accurate prediction about bitcoin's price in 2022.
Last May, when bitcoin was trading above $28,000, he predicted it would fall to $20,000. One month later, the prediction came true.
Recently, Mobius told the media that given rising interest rates and the Federal Reserve's tightening monetary policy, the price of bitcoin will fall below $10,000 in 2023. Because "as interest rates rise, it becomes less attractive to hold or buy bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies because there is no interest paid just to hold bitcoin."
Carol Alexander, a finance professor at the University of Sussex, made a similar prediction in 2022, also seeing Bitcoin falling to $10,000 by 2022.
But her view has shifted to optimism. Alexander believes that "whales" holding large amounts of bitcoin will step in to support the market as the FTX thunder domino effect takes hold and bitcoin trading collapses. "Whales" are those who own more than 1,000 Bitcoins. According to fintech firm River Financial, the 97 richest Bitcoin wallet addresses own 14.15 percent of bitcoin.
She expects the price of bitcoin to top $30,000 in the first quarter, followed by $50,000 in the third or fourth quarter, as the whale comes to the rescue.
The volatility of cryptocurrencies has led some institutions to give up on predicting Bitcoin's price.
"Whether Bitcoin is $5,000 or $50,000 this time next year, it's not going to be a surprise because the market is very much driven by sentiment," said Laith Khalaf, financial analyst at AJ Bell. Trying to predict Bitcoin prices is a fool's game.