Bitcoin Price Will Hit $25,000 By End of 2018, Says Cryptocurrency Bull Tom Lee
Bitcoin’s price will soar to $25,000 by December 2018 says noted bitcoin bull Tom Lee. Lee made the prediction in the wake of an overnight spike in bitcoin prices following a two-week drought when BTC plunged below $7,000.
“We still feel pretty confident that bitcoin is a great risk-reward and we think it could reach $25,000 by the end of the year,” Lee, the co-founder of Fundstrat, told CNBC April 12. (video below).
As of late-afternoon on Thursday, bitcoin prices hovered at $7,680, up 10.7 percent from 24 hours earlier.
Lee has partially attributed bitcoin’s recent price slump to a mass sell-off stemming from cryptocurrency holders trying to avoid capital-gains taxes before Tax Day in the United States. Lee had predicted that BTC prices would steadily climb after April 17, which is when Tax Day falls this year because April 15 is a Sunday.
‘Bitcoin Was Incredibly Oversold’
While crypto skeptics spent the last two weeks sounding the drumbeat to “bitcoin is dead” chants, Lee’s faith in the top virtual currency by market cap never wavered.
“Bitcoin was incredibly oversold,” Lee said. “When you look at metrics like price-to-book, which is ‘money cost,’ or our ‘bitcoin misery index,’ it’s pretty much what you saw at the end of the 2014 bear market — not the start.”
Meanwhile, some heavy-duty Old Money has started trickling into the cryptocurrency market.
The Rockefeller family (estimated net worth: $1 trillion) has partnered with the crypto investor group CoinFund to help entrepreneurs launch blockchain-based businesses. Blockchain is the technology behind bitcoin.
Big-Name Investors Throw Money Behind Blockchain
David Pakman is a partner in Venrock, the venture-capital arm of the Rockfeller family.
Pakman said Venrock has no interest in making short-term profits, but in making a long-term investment in blockchain technology, which experts believe can transform the banking industry, supply-chain management, stock trading, voting, and even the music business.
“There are a lot of crypto traders in the market,” Pakman told Fortune. “There are a lot of cryptocurrency hedge funds. This is different. To us, it looks a little bit more like venture capital.”
Similarly, Ripple — the blockchain-based payment network — just announced that it has invested $25 million of its XRP cryptocurrency into Blockchain Capital Parallel IV, a $150 million fund that will invest in blockchain ventures.
“As pioneers in the blockchain sector, we have been on the frontlines and in the trenches with our portfolio companies, like Ripple, building a new crypto ecosystem,” said Bart Stephens, co-founder and managing partner of Blockchain Capital. “There are entire verticals — such as healthcare or identity management — that could benefit from blockchain or distributed ledger technology.”
As of this writing, the author owns no bitcoin.
