Bitcoin has definitely seen better days and it doesn’t seem as if things will improve for the world’s largest cryptocurrency anytime soon. However, Fundstrat’s Tom Lee expects Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market to bounce back thanks to a number of cryptocurrency related announcements by many companies.
One of these announcements was a recent one by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten. The sponsor for Football Club Barcelona recently announced plans to launch its very own cryptocurrency called “Rakuten Coin”. This announcement shows how other firms are accepting cryptocurrencies and are willing to invest in them. According to Lee:
“The announcement by Rakuten is another example of positive developments in crypto in 2018, suggesting the large sell-off in bitcoin and others at the start of the year was an overshoot to the downside.”
Lee believes that Bitcoin will climb back up and hit $20,000 this time in 2018 while closing the year at $25,000. Many other experts agree with Lee such as Julian Hosp, who predicted Bitcoin’s fall before it even happened. Hosp believed that Bitcoin would fall after which it would rise to new all-time highs, and he still believes that is the case. Lee is also the only Wall Street strategist to give out price targets for Bitcoin, although there are many others who feel the same way as him.
As seen in the graph, Bitcoin has had a rocky road so far. It fell as to as low as $6000 at one point and has been hovering around $10,000 to $11,000 ever since. When it seems like Bitcoin is about to grow, the entire crypto market crashes and everything is reset again. However, according to Lee, this is all fine. Lee says that Bitcoin has always hit its lows in the first two months of almost every year in the past. Therefore, he believes that this year might not be as different and that the currency should pick up the pace soon.
Similarly, altcoins have also performed well late March in the past. More importantly, altcoins such as Ripple have performed well after sharp drops. Such is the case right now with Ripple having dropped by more than half of its all-time high. At one point, Ripple even fell below the $1 mark which speaks volumes about the state of the cryptocurrency market in general. There was a point where the market cap of Bitcoin wasn’t the dominating figure in the total crypto market cap. However, that status quo has been restored again as altcoins declined along with Bitcoin.
However, firms such as Rakuten and others are interested in using cryptocurrency. There was even an online poll which received a favorable response on whether people would be willing to use cryptocurrency to purchase products at Amazon. If the US-based e-commerce giant was to implement its own cryptocurrency, that would result in a widespread acceptance of cryptocurrency by different merchants and would drastically help the market as a whole. Furthermore, the introduction of LitePay has already started to help cryptocurrency be more accessible to everyone with the help of Visa-like ATM cards.
Also, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin which are heavily criticized for their slow performance are looking to improve. Bitcoin will be implementing the “Lightning Network” soon which will help it solve its problem of slow and costly transactions. Thus, all signs point towards cryptocurrency having a great 2018 as Lee predicts.
In 2018, we forecast at least 3 major publicly-traded corporations to issue native digital tokens,” Lee said. “Already three major companies have announced efforts within crypto-currencies, which demonstrate that corporations may be moving towards crypto-currencies before Wall Street has embraced them.”
However, although the future seems bright for the cryptocurrency market, it also has a lot of uncertainty to it. At one point people predicted Bitcoin to reach $60,000 and now look where Bitcoin is. Thus, one should do their own research before investing in crypto and should always be wary of the unpredictability of cryptocurrency.