IBM VP of Blockchain and Digital Currencies Jesse Lund is bullish on Bitcoin – so bullish, in fact, that he set a long-term $1 million price target.
Bitcoin Price Has Million-Dollar Potential
Lund revealed his long-term Bitcoin price target at the recent Think Conference, in an interview with Fred Schebesta.
The IBM executive pointed out that the higher the price of a crypto asset, the more utility it has. Therefore, he thinks people should focus less on the moving prices of crypto assets and more on their utility.
“If the price of Bitcoin were higher, there would be more liquidity on the network, we could be having a really different discussion with banks right now,” he says.
He adds that speculators are hurting the value of cryptocurrencies “because they’re thinking about it wrong.”
Later in the interview, Lund made an astonishing remark as to the future of cryptocurrencies. By New Year’s Eve, he predicts the price of Bitcoin will be $5,000. However, his long-term outlook is much different.
“I have a long-term outlook. […] It goes back to that discussion about the utility of the network with a higher price. I see Bitcoin at a million dollars someday. I like that number because if Bitcoin’s at a million dollars, then the satoshi is on value parity with the US penny. And that means there’s over $20 trillion of liquidity in this network. Think about $20 trillion in liquidity and how that changes things like corporate payments.”
Lund’s view is that when the Bitcoin price gets high enough, serious banks take more interest. When this happens, the utility of the token increases at its core value proposition – less-expensive transfers of value. Both IBM and R3 Corda are working hard on creating solutions for cross-border payment solutions using multiple digital assets.
It’s not every day that someone from the old world of technology predicts such a high price for Bitcoin. The $5,000 figure may even be debatable from here, as speculators make anything possible.
Lund: Stellar is a ‘Viable Settlement Instrument’
IBM recently launched its World Wire product, which in part relies on major cryptocurrency Stellar. Lund explained that Stellar is useful for cross-border payments, despite its smaller market cap.
“There’s no technical reason or technical barriers that should prevent money from flowing the same way [as information]. […] The architecture of World Wire is really a cross-border payment network, the magic of which, if you will, the novelty of it, is the ability to send payment instructions saying, ‘Hey, I’m sending you something, get ready.’ And on the other end, the receiver is making sure that who you’re sending it to is not some nefarious actor or bad actor.”
“Once that happens, and that happens really fast, then we send the value along with it. That transfer of value is made possible by digital instruments, settlement instruments, of which Lumens is one. So we see Lumens as a viable settlement instrument in this ecosystem of cross-border payments.”
Lund believes that a variety of assets should be available when making cross-border settlements. Most blockchain protocols outside of smart contract platforms don’t allow for the transfer of multiple assets. In essence, IBM’s World Wire is an alternative to R3’s Corda settlement layer, which in part uses Ripple.
Featured Image from Shutterstock. Price Charts from TradingView.
