Bitcoin Could Skyrocket to $318K By Dec. 2021, Citibank Says

Citibank analyst Thomas Fitzpatrick predicts a rally that will drive Bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market value – at last check, $329 Billion, to $318,000 per coin in the upcoming 13 months.

The analyst, who bases his argument on the crypto’s expanding market cycles, drew a comparison of the digital currency’s movements to the gold market, which ranged between $20-$35/oz for 50 years before breaking out in 1971 to hit $800/oz by 1980. The spike was the result of policies that ended dollar convertibility to gold.

In a report sent last week to institutional clients, titled “Bitcoin: 21st Century Gold,” Fitzpatrick, who heads Citibank’s G10 Forex business, theorizes that features like BTC’s limited supply, its digital form, and more importantly, dynamics like gold’s decoupling from paper money, the coronavirus pandemic, and aggressive expansion of the Fed’s open market operations, could lead to explosive growth in Bitcoin’s price.

Fitzpatrick believes that Bitcoin is actually in a bull market. Based on his analysis, the corrective period following the last two BTC bull runs – with the first one running from 2011 to 2013, and the latest bull run peaking in 2017’s record high of $20K per coin — has remained stable at around 12 months. This places the cryptocurrency in the middle of a bull run, which as Fitzpatrick notes, started in December 2018 and is potentially set to run until late 2022.

It could be argued that such an extended bull run has led the Citibank analyst to his $318K BTC target by Dec. 2021. a projected 1,800% price surge.

It should be noted that Fitzpatrick also mentions in his analysis the fact that a vicious bear market followed in both bull market cases, prompting BTC’s price per coin to nosedive by about 85 percent.

Price Action

Bitcoin’s price-trend continues to show positive signs, blowing past $16,000 less than a month after topping $11,000. As of writing, BTC is changing hands at $17,637 on Coinmarketcap – up 6.28% in the last 24-hours. Other major cryptos including Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) are also higher, gaining 3.83% to $479.59, 7.14% to $0.30, and 3.21% to $257.34, respectively.