4th January 2023 > > Price predictions.

tl;dr

Some jolly good fun price predictions for 2023.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A positive start to the year with some coins that were badly beaten up in 2022 staging a rebound. As an example, SOL (Solana) is up 38% in 2023 (disclosure: the CCC treasury’s last action of last year was a highly speculative investment in SOL). Alts always underperform in bear markets and outperform in bull markets. SOL was one of the casualties of the FTX fiasco and though some of you may think I am grasping at straws here (you are probably right), this small recovery in SOL’s price is not to be ignored.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary — Some predictions for 2023 price action

This is simply for fun – none of these people have any more insight than you or me, but it can be useful to know what people are thinking.

Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift, is talking my kind of language:

“It also has a lot to do with the macro environment. As long as interest rates are held high and monetary conditions are tighter, it’s going to be a headwind. That’ll start changing in early to mid [2023]. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if bitcoin was at like $40,000 by the summer. That wouldn’t surprise me at all. And that’s like 2.5X from here. So, it’s a great return.”

Mark Yusko, CEO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, has the forthcoming halving in mind:

“Then when we get to summer, that’s when we’ll get the next speculative move, and guess is that will come in anticipation of the next halving in 2024.”

Halving refers to the pre-determined event that the mining rewards for each block are halved. The last time this happened was in May 2020 when rewards were reduced to 6.25 BTC per block. We are just less than 18 months away from the next halving and there tends to be a lot of excitement around graphs like this one:

Note that the price of BTC is expressed as a log scale.

Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise, doesn’t believe we have to wait much longer:

“So, in 2014, the market was down almost 60%. 2018 – market down north of 70%. And this year, obviously, 2022, the market is down around 60%. The expectation, if the market continues its historical trend, would be that we begin a new cycle [in 2023].”

He is also a believer in my personal contrarian investing philosophy, which can be emotionally difficult to implement at times:

“… the story of [2022] is definitely a bear market. Nevertheless, we’ve seen increased interest from our client base. And I think the backdrop for many crypto investors is that there have historically been four-year cycles, and while there are opportunities to make money in many crypto market moments, bear markets are the moments when fortunes can be made.”

Tim Draper, Bitcoin billionaire, put a $250k price on BTC for the end of 2022. He accepts he was wrong, but remains super-bullish:

“$250k by 2022. My prediction was off by a bit. Hasn’t made it there…yet. Certainly before the halvening.” (*)

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On the negative side of the ledger, we have Standard Chartered who see a price of $5k in 2023 with ever-rising yields (I am no longer convinced they are right about that) and further contagion from over-leveraged failures in the crypto world, which is always an important tail-end risk.

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But perhaps the one person we should really listen to is Alex McCurry, CEO, and co-founder of blockchain solution provider Solidify.io:

“Bitcoin is a completely unpredictable asset.”

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(*) Halving and halvening are two expressions of the same event.