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 🐂 Move out of my way

We’ve talked about the bullish narrative, we’ve talked about the historical possibility of a drawdown, and now, dear readers, let’s talk price targets and analysis. 

It’s been a while since we spoke to Ledn’s John Glover to get his end-of-year expectations and the levels he’s watching. Glover uses the Elliott Wave Theory, which is a technical analysis that uses previous price movements to predict future movements. 

Basically, if we’ve carved out the high here at just below $100k (last Friday we saw it go as high as $99,800 before falling back) then he’s looking at $125,000. However — and this is the part that might make the big bulls sad — we might not see $100k breached this year. 

Glover said his “favorite” move right now (or the one that seems most likely to him) is that bitcoin’s “topped out at these levels, and we're going to drop back down to kind of $75,000 to $80,000 and then moving into next year, then we'll see that big rally.”

There is another scenario though where bitcoin quickly breaks $100k and climbs up to $125,000. If that happens, we could see the price top out at $160,000. 

But Glover pointed out that he expects to see a decent amount of profit-taking. After all, we’ve seen a $20,000+ jump in bitcoin’s price in just the last few weeks alone and it would be “typical … behavior when you've had such a big move ahead of the real event.”

“So we have the news event, which is [President-elect Donald] Trump getting in. Now the real event is Trump [taking office] and people will take profit ahead of that, waiting to see whether or not that's really going to change the regulatory stance of the US and push things forward,” he continued. 

The lack of a so-called real news event is also why announcements — like MicroStrategy buying up over $5 billion of bitcoin — didn’t move the needle. 

Bitcoin’s pause may be beneficial to the overall crypto environment though. 

“We’re seeing a lot of switching from bitcoin into altcoins,” Glover noted. And here’s your reminder, as I wrote last week, HashKey Capital’s Jupiter Zheng expects a “massive altcoin season” when bitcoin dominance peaks. 

Glover does think that the final move up — whether it’s to $125,000 or $160,000 — could end this iteration of the bull run and would be followed by a correction. 

“Now, that correction isn't going to take us back down to $20,000. I think if we get that correction from $160,000 we probably correct down to $115,000. If we get it from $125,000, we correct down to $95,000 or something … I think that somewhere in 2025-2026 we will finish this [bull run],” he said.

Can you even believe we started this year at around $40,000?

— Katherine Ross

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• Uniswap Labs is offering a bug bounty worth up to over $15 billion. 

• Ethereum Blob usage is on the rise, matching record activity previously seen in March. 

• Kraken plans to shutter its NFT marketplace and reallocate resources. 

• Ripple donated $25 million to Fairshake, the pro-crypto PAC, the third such donation of that amount. 

• Bitcoin’s nowhere close to being a bubble, Pantera Capital’s Dan Morehead said.

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Q: Pantera’s Morehead also believes that “in the not-too-distant future, every investment firm will have a blockchain team and a sizable, permanent blockchain allocation.” What kind of timeframe should we expect?

It’s a tough one. Morehead was smart to give out a more generic answer because I don’t think anyone can give a firm timetable. But I do think we’ve started to see the tides of change already. 

More and more companies are starting to either look into or create blockchain teams. Just take a peek at some of the attendees already locked in for our Digital Asset Summit next year!

I’m pretty firmly of the belief that we’re going to start seeing this evolution into blockchain over the next couple of years — though it may take longer — as crypto gets further and further from being seen as risky and tied to bad actors like Sam Bankman-Fried.

Perhaps that’s not the most fun answer, but it’s an honest one at least.

— Katherine Ross