Tom Lee, a well-known Wall Street bull and managing partner and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, who is known as the "Bitcoin Bull", predicted in January this year that with the passage of the Bitcoin spot ETF, the price of Bitcoin will rise in the next 12 months. Rushing to $100,000 or $150,000, it may even jump to $500,000 in the next 5 years.
However, after hitting an all-time high of about $73,000 in March, Bitcoin has begun to weaken. For most of the past few months, it has been hovering between $60,000 and $70,000, and even fell below $60,000 at one point. However, Tom In an exclusive interview with CNBC on the 1st, Lee still insisted on his prediction that Bitcoin would reach $150,000.
Mt. Gox sell-off worries lifted, will fuel surge?
Regarding Bitcoin’s recent weak trend, Tom Lee analyzed:
Bitcoin may be suffering from the Mt. Gox distribution starting in July, which has been a huge concern for years, and if I invested in crypto knowing that one of the biggest concerns was going to go away in July, I think, this is actually Reasons to expect a big rebound in the second half, so I think $150,000 is still possible this year.
Mt. Gox, once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, was attacked by hackers in 2014 and 850,000 Bitcoins were stolen. After 10 years of bankruptcy litigation, the compensation process has finally begun. The Mt. Gox trustee It announced last month that it would repay 142,000 BTC and 143,000 BCH to creditors starting in July, and the repayment process is expected to be completed by October this year.
This has made the market quite uneasy, with investors worried that creditors may soon sell some of the Bitcoins they have been waiting for for more than 10 years. At the same time, the U.S. and German governments transferred large amounts of previously seized Bitcoin to exchanges at the end of June, which also triggered selling concerns.
However, Galaxy Research Director Alex Thorn recently analyzed that the selling pressure on Mt. Gox will be less than expected. He pointed out that nearly 75% of creditors chose to pay compensation early (need to accept a 10% impairment), so there will only be about 95,000 coins. Bitcoins are used to pay compensation early, remaining Bitcoins will take longer to pay, and individual creditors will become more determined to hold on to Bitcoins.
Further reading: Don’t panic! Galaxy: Three reasons why Mt. Gox’s BTC selling pressure will be less than expected, Bitcoin stands back at $60,000
Most of Bitcoin’s annual gains are completed in 10 days
Regardless, CNBC pointed out that investors are still optimistic about the trend of Bitcoin, because during the past summer, Bitcoin fluctuated in the 20% range for several months, and then finally began to rise sharply. Historically, Bitcoin has Bitcoin usually approaches a new all-time high about 18 months after a halving, and Bitcoin's fourth halving just happened in April.
It is worth noting that Tom Lee pointed out that most of Bitcoin’s annual increases occur within 10 days of each year:
If you take out the best 10 days of the year, Bitcoin actually had negative returns.
