American Venture capitalist investor and founder of Draper associates, Timothy Cook Draper has disclosed that he is optimistic about the rise of Bitcoin in 2023.
Despite the recent bloodbath witnessed in the crypto market, Draper still maintains his prediction that there will soon be a surge in the price of Bitcoin.
He had earlier predicted that Bitcoin would rise to $250,000 by the end of 2022, however, with the recent massive decline in price of cryptocurrencies, he has extended his prediction to six months which is mid-next year.
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In his words, “No change in the price prediction. Still $250,000 by early next year. I have extended my prediction by six months. $250k is still my number”.
While Draper believes that there will be a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin next year, several other investors such as Mark Mobius have predicted more woes for Bitcoin amidst its plummeting price. Mobius believes that Bitcoin will fall by more than 40%.
Draper believes that the recent collapse of the crypto exchange platform FTX has nothing to do with the success of Bitcoin, noting that Bitcoin is decentralized and FTX is centralized.
“FTX was centralized, reliant on a single founder. When a currency is centralized, it has a single point of failure and can be manipulated”, he said.
He further disclosed that the fall of FTX would only trigger more decentralization in crypto as it has shown the biggest vulnerabilities of centralization.
In a YouTube show six months ago, he disclosed that women could be key in pushing the largest crypto market cap up to $250,000 per coin.
His reason is that if store owners begin a wide acceptance of BTC as a means of payment, more women will begin to have Bitcoin wallets as they will want to shop with it.
With Draper’s prediction of a surge in Bitcoin to $250,000 in six months, crypto investors will only hope for the prediction to be feasible as the crypto industry has been ravaged by the recent collapse of FTX.
It has led to a severe liquidity crisis in the industry as the prices of crypto assets have gone down, leading to an overall bearish sentiment in the crypto market, which has seen investors withdraw their investments in droves.
The crypto market was already in an awful state even before the FTX collapse. Ever since reaching all-time highs in November 2022, it has massively declined with the price of Bitcoin plunging from $69,000 to around $18,000-20,000.
FTX bankruptcy has no doubt sent shockwaves to the industry as major crypto lender BlockFi had earlier filed for bankruptcy, as there are speculations that other crypto exchanges could also file for bankruptcy.
Currently, confidence in the industry is relatively low, as there are concerns by investors that there will be a ripple effect of the FTX collapse on other exchange platforms.