Billionaire tech investor and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya believes Bitcoin can reach as high as $500k by October next year. According to him, the premier digital currency is on its way to becoming even scarcer after the May halving and will likely increase in valuation with time. He also believes that the top cryptocurrency is swiftly becoming a global reserve asset, similar to Gold.
Palihapitiya, a Canadian-American venture capitalist worth $1.2 billion, has a history of backing successful tech startups emerging from Silicon Valley. He is the CEO of Social Capital, a VC firm based in Palo Alto, California, and has extensive executive experience with Facebook, which he quit in 2011. He has been an avid Bitcoin user and promoter for the last few years and is known to give flamboyant predictions regarding its price performance in the future.
Bitcoin’s Recent Price Action
Bitcoin has had a month to forget, with short-term bears dominating the proceedings. Here is the price movement from the last five days:
Image Source: TradingView
The cryptocurrency tried hard to move above $66k during the day before the Summer Solstice on June 20, but the bulls ultimately failed to do so. Subsequently, the premier digital currency started falling in value and is now struggling to remain clear above the $64k level.
Various crypto analysts and commentators had predicted that the digital currency would reverse its trend at the end of the 2nd quarter of this year, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Now, they are predicting a late Q3 or Q4 bull market continuation of Bitcoin. There aren’t enough worthwhile bullish signals emerging from the market in the short term.
Can Bitcoin Reach $500k by October 2025?
According to Palihapitiya, the main driving forces for Bitcoin’s rise to $500k will be its growing status as a reserve currency and its deflationary mechanism triggered after the halving event. He used these variables and analyzed the digital currency’s performance with the previous 2020-2021 bull market in mind.
This is how he ended up with the magical $500k figure. Bitcoin’s rise to $500k would mean that the digital currency’s market capitalization would balloon close to $10 trillion from the current $1.26 trillion. This is a massive price jump, and it would make the digital currency more valuable than any other asset besides gold itself. It is certainly achievable in the long term, but there isn’t a high chance of it happening during this bull market.
Most experts, including Standard Chartered, are predicting anywhere between $120k and $250k during the highly anticipated 2024-2025 bull market, and that seems like a safer bet. However, Bitcoin is known to defy expectations, and this bull market could be one of the biggest upticks the markets have ever seen.
