By Staff Writer
Bitcoin has breached the $17,000 mark today, soaring to its highest price since January 8, 2018.
We spoke to a number of experts below:
Antoni Trenchev is Managing Partner at Nexo, a leading crypto-lender – well known for issuing the world’s first instant crypto credit lines. They’ve processed over $3BN in just two years and have 800K+ users.
“The crypto industry is ecstatic to see the price of crypto’s bellwether Bitcoin hit $17K, the highest in nearly two years. Back in March, I predicted that BTC could reach 50K by end-2020 and now there is increasing evidence of that upward trend. A few recent events have undoubtedly had an impact: institutional investment by the likes of MicroStrategy and Square, PayPal actively shilling crypto, and the Bitcoin halving in May, among others. It is also worth pointing out that Bitcoin’s success is not temporary: the one-year HODL wave, which reveals how many investors hold BTC for over a year, is at an all-time high. What makes this story all the more fulfilling is the positive spillover we are witnessing into other areas of the crypto market, such as DeFi….Although hard to predict, the potential for the price of Bitcoin to keep moving upwards is evident, we could well see it imminently top the $20K mark it reached a few years ago.”
Lucas Huang, Head of Growth at Tokenlon, a decentralized exchange said:
“On decentralised exchange Tokenlon, ETH and USD-token trading pairs are usually the most popular with our users. However, as of last week however, we saw the pairs of Bitcoin-tokens such as imBTC and wBTC gain in popularity. Is the top already in? We can’t tell, but our users are certainly interested in Bitcoin’s rallying price. With growing interest from institutions and consumer-facing products like PayPal starting to offer crypto services, we feel this rally has a much stronger fundamental than the one we had two years ago. We may not wait long to see Bitcoin all-time-high again…”
Lior Messika, Founder and Managing Partner at Eden Block, a venture capital firm specializing in blockchain technology and Web 3.0. said:
“Bitcoin’s underlying economic value is based on the cost of energy required to “mine” a block. The huge, global energy market ensured that the underlying value of Bitcoin remains relatively constant and provides equal opportunity for all to participate in the mining process. However, Bitcoin is plagued with volatility since it has neither an established narrative nor an ability to manipulate its proportionality in response to fluctuations in its underlying value. As time goes on, the Bitcoin narrative is strengthening, although the global belief in its usability is still negligible. This has resulted in continuing volatility for the asset.”
Pol Lanski, from the tech team at Hermez, a scalability solution said:
“Bitcoin is usually the entry point for many people into cryptocurrency and a sharp and sudden rise in popularity is likely to bring both high fees and a poor user experience. The concern here is that if new users enter the crypto sphere with Bitcoin alone and have a poor user experience with exorbitant fees, we may lose them forever – causing long-term harm to the mass adoption of digital assets.”
“High fees and poor user experience could be solved using Layer 2 solutions. If we could onboard new users directly to Layer 2, we would see lower fees, less congestion and the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies would arrive much faster than Bitcoin alone.”
