News Bites
Bitcoin price to set new record by year-end, institutional money will flood in once this happens - Jason Urban
Editor's Note: Don't miss Kitco's LIVE interview with Gareth Soloway, chief market strategist of InTheMoneyStocks.com, on Tuesday, June 29, at 4:00 pm EST, to be hosted by anchor David Lin. Comments and questions will be taken.
Bitcoin’s multi-month price decline, which started in April when the world’s largest cryptocurrency began its descent from then record highs, is only going to last the summer, according to Jason Urban, co-head of Galaxy Digital Trading at Galaxy Digital.
Speaking to Kitco News editor-in-chief Michelle Makori, Urban said that by this Fall, institutional investors will re-emerge into the space and drive the price back up to breach new all-time highs, hitting at least $70,000 by year-end.
Galaxy Digital is a diversified financial services firm focused on cryptocurrencies, with four branches of operations: asset management, trading, principal investing, and investment banking. The firm, founded by Michael Novogratz, has recently partnered with Goldman Sachs to trade Bitcoin futures.
“I definitely think we can see something north of $70,000 by the end of the year,” Urban said. “I think that we can expect all that FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that we’ve seen in recent weeks to kind of cause a flat trend in the market through the summer and I think that as we pull into the Fall, a lot of this institutional adoption and these aspirational moves that we’ve seen will start to manifest itself, and we should see the market take out those highs.”
So what’s been holding institutions back so far? It’s not less, but lack of clarity on regulations that institutional investors need, Urban noted.
“I think that obviously some regulatory clarity on what can be done, what can’t be done,” he said. “The smart players [in the crypto space] want to work with regulators come up with solutions that address their concerns while simultaneously allowing the technology…to flourish.”
Urban’s comments come as Bitcoin just faced a new onslaught of criticisms, this time from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) which wrote in a recent report that “cryptocurrencies are speculative assets rather than money, and in many cases are used to facilitate money laundering, ransomware attacks and other financial crimes.”
Earlier in the week, the People’s Bank of China outlawed over-the-counter trading of Bitcoin in China, and banned several major miners, reducing the country’s crypto mining capacity by 90%.
Urban said that regulations could be beneficial, but attempts to outlaw Bitcoin are simply futile.
“You can’t outlaw progress. You can regulate it, you just can’t outlaw it,” he said.
For more details on where Institutions are on the adoption curve as well as what Urban sees as the only existential threat to Bitcoin, watch the video above. Follow Michelle Makori on Twitter @MichelleMakori (https://twitter.com/MichelleMakori).
