Ronnie Moas, stock research analyst and founder of Standpoint Research, shares his thoughts that Bitcoin that is currently traded at $2,600 can reach $5,000 within this year. As far as the quantity of bitcoins is limited to 21 million, increased demand is very likely to drive its price up.
Moas confirms his belief in cryptocurrencies saying that he has already invested a few hundred U.S. dollars each in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin and is going to invest even more. He is planning to release a 40-page report on digital currencies in the next few weeks.
“This is not something I could keep my hands off of,” Moas said. “What would be more painful than losing [money in cryptocurrencies] is not acting.”
“$5,000 could happen in a few months. It’s only starting to gain traction right now,” Moas goes on. “It’s starting to spread like wildfire right now. In the next 6 to 12 months you’re going to have a little bit of a hysteria. However, this has a long, long way to go before it gets to bubble territory.”
Other cryptocurrency experts share the opinion of Moas. Goldman Sachs’ technical analyst Sheba Jafari has recently predicted that bitcoin could rise as high as $3,915 while Michael Novogratz, a $3.2 bln investor and former manager of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Fortress, said that the cryptocurrency market will likely reach $5 trillion by 2022.
According to the CoinMarketCap data, the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has risen from $20 billion at the beginning of the year to about $100 billion now. Bitcoin and Ethereum have the largest market values of $42 billion and $25 billion respectively.
Yesterday, Litecoin set a new record with its market capitalization having reached $2.706 billion. This allowed the currency to become the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, surpassing Ethereum Classic, Dash and NEM.
Such incredible growth of Litecoin lately could be explained by the fact that the founder Charlie Lee resigned his position of Director of Engineering at Coinbase and focused on Litecoin developing.
“There will be scams, there will be accounts wiped out, there will be people that get hurt, like every other technology that is going on,” Moas said. “But I think the cryptocurrency is here to stay. I think we’re in the second inning of a 9-inning ball game.”
Nowadays, many experts, including those from Wall Street, believe that the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin can fundamentally change the way the world operates, just like the Internet did once.