The price of Bitcoin increased by 28% between March 12 and 14, reaching $26,500, its highest level since June 2022. Some may attribute the gains to the Consumer Price Index’s (CPI) 6% year-over-year increase in February, even though the figure was in line with expectations.
In January, ARK analyst Yassine Elmandjra wrote in the firm’s "Big Ideas 2022" outlook report that Bitcoin’s price could exceed $500,000 by 2026. Elmandjra argued that Bitcoin adoption would find momentum as more nations adopt the coin as legal tender.
Lee shared an even more bullish prediction about Bitcoin, saying that the leading cryptocurrency could surge to $200K in the following years. At the time, he argued that the interest rates will cause bond owners to lose money in the future. As such, many American investors will allocate their capital to alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies, and that could fuel bitcoin’s price to $200,000.
A crucial takeaway from this latest bull run is that exaggerated narratives and the urge for high returns spurred “greed” among investors. While this is often assumed to be associated with retail investors, this cycle showed that even the most blue-blood investment firms were engaging in dangerous and unsound behavior.Secondly, it became apparent that in the Web3 ecosystem, many of the prevailing token design principles needed to be sound.In addition, investors need to understand that crypto has yet to live up to the narrative of being an alternative asset class, as it is closely linked with traditional asset classes.
With Elon Musk's Twitter seeing a backlash, users are flocking to Web3 alternatives like Lens, Minds and Mastodon. Will the trend last?On crypto-based predictions market Polymarket, users are seemingly giving Twitter’s new and seemingly unwilling owner Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt. According to a bet expiring Dec. 15, only 36% of bettors think “Twitter reports any outages” by that date.Prediction markets, of course, are not infallible. But they do provide an interesting data point for people looking to become informed actors. By putting “skin in the game,” or money down that could conceivably be lost, betting markets give incentive to users to wager only on likely outcomes – deemphasizing their own preferences and other biases.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board made a change in October to help public companies that hold cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets.Institutional adoption is an exciting yet frustrating topic in crypto. The true modern-day crypto inheritors of the 90s cypherpunk legacy have a vision for crypto as human empowerment through decentralization. That vision includes breaking down the intermediaries that charge rents and threaten human freedom and privacy. On the other hand, Crypto Twitter becomes abuzz when a large financial institution makes new moves into crypto.
Bitcoin’s long-term holders’ NUPL metric has dropped to levels that coincided with market bottoms thrice since November 2011. Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market have been in a bear market for almost a year. The top cryptocurrency has seen its market valuation plummet by more than $900 billion in the said period, with macro fundamentals suggesting more pain ahead.
It has been a rough year for crypto. Prices have plunged, projects have collapsed and companies are laying off employees. In the U.S., bitcoin does not appear to be acting as the inflation hedge it was supposed to be. Nor has it been a safe haven from the turmoil of the stock market. One might ask: What is the point of crypto, anyway? In Turkey, crypto represents freedom from inflation, national currency and the constraints of corporate life, advocates say.
Bitcoin (BTC) retreated in Tuesday trading, falling 4%. The decline occurred on average volume, suggesting that investors lack conviction in the crypto market’s direction. Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization behind bitcoin, recently fell 5%.