The co-chief investment officer of one the cryptocurrency industry’s largest investment firms said that he expects the next bitcoin bull run to carry the cryptocurrency market cap 1,000 percent above its current valuation.
Pantera Capital’s Joey Krug made this prediction during an interview with Bloomberg, forecasting that the next upswing could propel the cryptocurrency market cap to more than $2 trillion.
“If you look at that next bull run, I think the crypto space overall could hit 10x from here.”
Noting that in previous market cycles the news that major financial industry players like Fidelity Investments and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) were entering the cryptocurrency space would have sparked a surge in speculative investments, Krug said that he believes the market is currently waiting on concrete adoption to catalyze a bull run.
For this to happen, he continued, cryptocurrency networks will need to achieve increased scalability, as the current state of cryptocurrency blockchain development is akin to the internet before dial-up.
He commented:
“If you look at the internet, it’s easy to say, ‘Well, you just create an app, get some users, and then you solve the scalability problems.’ But these are all markets, and so if you don’t have scalability, you don’t have market makers, and so you don’t have liquidity.”
As CCN has reported, two of those innovations for Bitcoin, in particular, include the Lightning and Liquid networks. The Lightning Network (LN), which is currently in beta, is a second-layer protocol that operates on top of Bitcoin. Using the network’s built-in scripting language, users can move funds “off-chain” into LN payment channels, where transactions do not require miner validation and can consequently be processed instantly at virtually no cost.
The Liquid Network, on the other hand, is a federated Bitcoin sidechain developed by blockchain startup Blockstream and targeted at cryptocurrency exchanges, financial institutions, and other bitcoin power users who desire to move large amounts of bitcoin more quickly and privately than they can across the main blockchain.
These technologies — as well as ones on other blockchains — are not yet ready for primetime, but Krug said that he expects some cryptocurrency networks to achieve Visa/Mastercard scale within the next couple of years, though that does not necessarily mean the bear market will endure for that long.
In the meantime, he said that he believes the cryptocurrency market has hit a bottom and will remain range-bound until the next catalyst arrives.
Featured Image from Blockchain at Berkeley/YouTube. Charts from TradingView.
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