Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have swung wildly over the last week, with the bitcoin price falling sharply before suddenly rebounding.
The ethereum price plunged along with bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies, wiping over $1 trillion from the combined crypto market in a matter of weeks and sparking fears of a new crypto winter.
Now, despite one Wall Street giant issuing a serious ethereum warning, Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest has predicted the bitcoin price could exceed $1 million by 2030—with ethereum’s market capitalization potentially topping $20 trillion.
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The bitcoin price remains highly volatile with bitcoin and ethereum both swinging wildly over the … [+]
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“We believe bitcoin is the most profound application of public blockchains, the foundation of ‘self-sovereign’ digital money,” Ark Invest analyst Yassine Elmandjra wrote in the company’s 2022 outlook report, arguing technological advancements such as the network’s Taproot upgrade and the second-layer Lightning Network could help bitcoin scale.
Bitcoin’s cumulative transfer volume increased by 463% in 2021, and its annual settlement volume has surpassed Visa’s annual payments volume, according to Ark’s research.
“Bitcoin’s market capitalization still represents a fraction of global assets and is likely to scale as nation-states adopt as legal tender,” Elmandjra wrote. “According to our estimates, the price of one bitcoin could exceed $1 million by 2030″—a 2,500% increase from the bitcoin price now.
The bitcoin price soared through much of 2021, helped on by El Salvador embracing the cryptocurrency and making it legal tender in September.
Earlier this month, investment giant Fidelity said other countries and even a central bank could follow El Salvador into bitcoin this year—predicting those that buy bitcoin while the price is low “will be better off competitively than their peers.”
Last year, Cathie Wood—a long-time supporter of Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk—made a bitcoin price prediction that the cryptocurrency would hit $500,000 by 2026.
Wood and Ark are also very bullish on ethereum, predicting its market cap could surge to $20 trillion in the next ten years, an increase of over 6,000% from around $300 billion.
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The bitcoin price soared to an all-time high of almost $70,000 per bitcoin last year before crashing … [+]
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The ethereum price has leaped over the last year amid a surge of interest in blockchain-based decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)—both largely built on top of ethereum’s network.
“Ethereum could displace many traditional financial services, and its native token, ether, could compete as global money,” wrote Elmandjra.
“As financial services move on-chain, decentralized networks are likely to take share from existing financial intermediaries. The beneficiaries of this shift include ethereum, the base protocol, and DeFi, the decentralized applications built on top of ethereum. As the preferred collateral in DeFi and the unit of account in NFT marketplaces, ether has the potential to capture a portion of the $123 trillion in global M2 [a measure of the money supply that includes cash, checking deposits, and easily-convertible near-money].”
“We’ve become just as bullish on [ethereum],” Wood said last year. “We see DeFi and NFTs taking off on the ethereum network.”
