The price of bitcoin could reach $100,000 by the end of this year, according to Reuters, multinational bank Standard Chartered said, arguing that the so-called “crypto winter” is over.

The paper, authored by Jeff Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, argues that bitcoin could benefit from recent turmoil in the banking sector, improvements in cryptocurrency mining, and stabilization of volatile assets after the US Federal Reserve is ending its policy of raising base interest rates.

This expectation by investors that the Fed will ease its monetary policy to prevent the US from entering a recession is actually the basis of the spectacular comeback in the price of Bitcoin this year, with the same effect felt by many companies listed on the stock exchange. which suffered huge losses in market value last year.

“While uncertainty remains, we believe the path to the $100,000 level is on the way [pentru un bitcoin] becomes clearer,” Kendrick noted in the review.

In 2023, the price of Bitcoin rose above $30,000, breaking this psychological threshold in April for the first time in 10 months.

The very optimistic predictions about the evolution of Bitcoin are back

But its gains represent only a partial recovery after trillions of dollars evaporated from the cryptocurrency sector in 2022 as central banks around the world raised key interest rates to tame inflation.

Adding to this “problem” outside the sector’s control has been a series of spectacular bankruptcies of some crypto companies, the example of FTX being the most notable in this regard.

It should be noted, however, that predictions of astronomical Bitcoin prices were also quite common during the cryptocurrency’s previous boom periods, when it lifted the entire crypto sector when its price rose.

For example, a Citi analyst said in November 2020 that the price of Bitcoin could reach $318,000 by the end of 2022. But in reality, Bitcoin ended last year with a depreciation of about 65%, and the price of Bitcoin was only $16,500.