00:00 Speaker A
So it’s certainly been an interesting year for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies more broadly. But perhaps a little surprising, considering we also hit new milestones in terms of institutional adoption and new regulatory and legislative support, we ended the year without, um, huge gains. So, as we close out the year, given this support, what are your thoughts on it?
00:27 Speaker B
Yeah, I mean, I think Bitcoin is generally short-term volatile, there’s no difference here. I think the market is a little different now. You know, there are more institutional buyers that are slow and steady buyers. Um, so there’s this uh loop
00:46 Speaker B
You know, Bitcoin goes through bull and bear phases. So, I think there was some speculation that that might be the case, but there were some structural issues that caused the sell-off, you know, basically some uh FX issues and uh macro news and high leverage. So we’re already about 15% below the lowest price we saw a few weeks ago.
01:10 Speaker B
Well, for example, JPMorgan Chase is asking to raise $170,000 over the next six to 12 months. Stratefor’s Tom Lee asked for $200,000 with a similar time frame. There’s also a lot of institutional buying, which I think is in the very early stages so far.
01:26 Speaker A
I mean, some of these people are calling for those kinds of price targets by the end of the year, but we’re not quite there yet. But, I mean, overall, do you agree with the numbers that you’re seeing and hearing?
01:38 Speaker B
Well, I think predicting time is very difficult, but I think people also have short memories, right? Thinking back to the last cycle, we had a top of 69,000, uh, around this time, you know, about 40% of the cycle, people thought that was the top, but it was a higher top later in the cycle, right? So, I think, you know, the timing of the cycle has been overly focused at that point.
02:01 Speaker B
So if people, uh, look beyond that and think the timing is not quite right and there are different buyers, you know, ETF buyers are very sticky. They are long-term investors. Uh, the Swiss National Bank, buying micro strategies, some Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds buying Bitcoin, some pension funds buying Bitcoin, and some banks, you know, investment firms like Fidelity asking for allocations of 1% to 5%,
02:26 Speaker B
Bank of America is two to four, uh, BlackRock is one to three. They were the first to propose model price targets as a model uh portfolio allocation. So I think these are very interesting. They build comfort and support among their investor base. But these things take time to take effect, right? Because, you know, banks have to participate in training programs to get information from their salespeople. So I think this will continue to happen in the coming years.
