Bitcoin
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The price of bitcoin has bottomed out at around $17,000 per bitcoin after crashing nearly $70,000 late last year. raising fears that the bitcoin and crypto industry is being “steered into oblivion.”
Now, after BlackRock’s chief executive revealed “the next generation for markets”, analysts at banking giant Standard Chartered have warned that the price of bitcoin could fall to $5,000 in 2023—another 70% drop that would reduce bitcoin’s market cap to around $100 billion and cause crypto chaos.
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Bitcoin price has so far failed to recover after a devastating price crash that erased more … [+]
“Yields are plunging with tech stocks, and while bitcoin selling is slowing, the damage is done,” wrote Eric Robertsen, global head of research at Standard Chartered, in a note first seen by CNBC entitled “financial market surprises of 2023”.
Robertsen warned that further declines in tech company stock prices will cause bitcoin’s price fall to accelerate, leading to more crypto company bankruptcies.
Over the past month, the fallout from the springtime collapse of stablecoin terraUSD and its supporting coin luna has finally hit the crypto industry, taking down the FTX exchange which appears to have deceived investors and defrauded users and plunged many smaller crypto companies in the crisis.
“More and more crypto businesses and exchanges find themselves with insufficient liquidity, leading to further bankruptcies and a collapse in investor confidence in digital assets,” Robertsen wrote, adding that it is not necessarily the most likely scenario, but a possibility currently downplayed by market consensus.
The “surprise” scenarios “have a non-zero probability of occurring in the coming year”.
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Bitcoin price has crashed around 70% in the past year with many issues bearish in 2023 … [+]
Bitcoin’s further price declines could coincide with a potential 30% rise in the price of gold, according to Robertsen, as “cryptocurrencies fall further and more crypto businesses succumb to shortages of liquidity and investor withdrawals”, re-establishing gold as the ultimate safe haven from market volatility.
“The resurgence of gold in 2023 [also] comes as equities resume their bear market and the correlation between stock and bond prices turns negative again,” Robertsen added.
A surge in the price of gold was also predicted by Saxo analysts in their annual “outrageous predictions”, forecasting that the price of gold could cross “the double top near $2,075 as if wasn’t there and reach at least $3,000” in 2023.
“Any belief in a return to pre-pandemic disinflationary dynamics is impossible because we have entered a world war economy, with all the major powers of the world now jostling to bolster their national security on all fronts; either in a true military sense, or due to deep supply chain, energy and even financial insecurities that have been laid bare by the experience of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia,” Steen Jakobsen, Saxo’s chief investment officer, said via email.