BENGALURU: The world’s largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which began its journey with Satoshi Nakamoto launching its white paper on January 3, 2009, marked the 15th anniversary on Wednesday. As per experts, this year will witness a turning point in Bitcoin’s evolution as it gears up for the halving in April.
“The halving, a programmed event, not only showcases Bitcoin’s robust supply control mechanism but historically triggers heightened demand, propelling prices upward. While regulatory scrutiny and scalability challenges persist, major banks are very bullish on Bitcoin prices, with some even suggesting it will break the all-time high of $69000 on the heels of the ETF and halving,” said Minal Thukral, executive VP - growth & strategy at CoinDCX.
Bitcoin touched a high of $45,000 on Wednesday for the first time since April 2022, but soon it fell 6.33% to trade at about $42,127. As the investor sentiment is strengthening in anticipation of BTC’s fourth halving event, Parth Chaturvedi, investments leads, CoinSwitch, said, amid diverse analyst predictions regarding BTC’s future, even traditional financial institutions like Standard Chartered Bank forecast a potential BTC value of $100k by the end of 2024.
“For the broader markets, the typical cycle follows a set pattern with capital first heading towards BTC increasing its market capitalisation dominance, which has already surpassed 50%. This is followed by the rotation of capital into Ethereum’s ETH and finally the peak bull-run gains steam as the capital rotates into riskier alt-coins. We are still in the first phase of the capital rotation cycle and there’s a lot of steam for growth in broader crypto prices,” he said.
He also said that crypto is a highly volatile asset to invest in and be prepared for sharp drawdowns in valuations. Meanwhile, crypto investment platform Mudrex said it witnessed a surge of $1 million in crypto deposits from prominent exchanges, including Binance, following the FIU (Financial Intelligence Unit) issuing show cause notices to nine overseas crypto exchanges for not complying with the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) provisions in India.