It's time to party like it's 2021! Or it feels that way if you put faith in a new report by Standard Chartered, a U.K. multinational bank that predicts the price of Bitcoin will climb to $50,000 this year and all the way to $120,000 by the end of 2024. The figures are an upward revision of an earlier bullish report by the bank and would amount to a 300% jump from its current price of around $30,000.
I confess it's fun to write this—if only because, after 18 months, one gets tired of reporting on regulatory crackdowns, collapsing prices, and the arrest of leading industry figures. In light of recent events, it's worth remembering crypto is not some scam but a 15-year-old project whose most high-profile asset—Bitcoin—is receiving bullish endorsements from major banks. (Goldman Sachs predicted $100,000 Bitcoin in early 2022.)
I've covered this industry for a decade now and believe two things are true. First, things are never as good as they seem during the bull markets—blockchain is never going to transform humanity—but nor are things as bad as they seem during bear markets.
Second, the price floor for Bitcoin (and possibly Ethereum) during a downturn will always be higher than the previous one. For instance, the price sunk to around $16,000 following the FTX debacle last year. Compare that with $3,000 after the popping of the 2017 bubble or $300 in 2014 after the Mt. Gox hack.
I'm not saying this price floor trend is a new Moore's Law. Only that it's much easier to imagine Bitcoin at $120,000 than at $10,000. Meanwhile, take note the analyst gnomes at Standard Chartered aren't pulling figures out of thin air, but are basing their prediction on a sensible thesis.
The thesis is that Bitcoin miners are making more profits, so they will sell fewer of the tokens they mine to raise cash. Fewer tokens dumped on the market means more scarcity, and that means higher prices. This scarcity trend is also going to accelerate during the next "halving" event in 2024, which will see the number of new Bitcoins minted every day drop from around 900 to more like 450. By the time that occurs, a lot of the scarcity will be priced in, but until then it's easy to see how the price will climb.
So will Bitcoin reach $120,000 by Dec. 31, 2024? I have no idea. Plenty of things could happen before then to deliver a major price shock to the crypto markets. Imagine, for instance, if Tether depegged or Binance collapsed or governments came together to bank crypto. But for now, the bank's prediction looks like a sound one—and it's more likely the party will begin over again than get shut down for good.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
