Bitcoin nears $US60,000 on Visa crypto adoption — so is expecting $US400k BTC by year-end too bullish?

Coinhead Derek Rose
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Cryptocurrency markets are a sea of green this afternoon after getting a boost from payments giant Visa.

Bitcoin gained more than $US2,000 in under three hours last night, hitting an eight-day high of over $US58,000 around 8.45pm AEDT, after Reuters reported around 6pm that the company would accept a stablecoin to settle payments.

Visa will accept the USD Coin, a project of Coinbase and Circle, to settle transactions made using Crypto.com’s credit card, Visa later confirmed. Crypto.com will send the USD coins, which are ERC-20 tokens pegged to the US dollar, to Visa’s address on the Ethereum network to settle card customer purchases.

Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire tweeted that it “marks a major turning point in mainstream adoption of crypto”.

At 2.35pm AEDT, Bitcoin had lost a bit of ground from last night, trading at $US57,278 ($74,793) – still up 3.2 per cent from 24 hours ago.

Ether was changing hands at $US1,795 ($2,352), up 5.4 per cent in the past day.

Of the top 100 coins on Coingecko, 77 were up in the past 24 hours, and 21 were down.

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Holo (HOT), a cloud hosting market for distributed applications, was the top performer, up 29.3 per cent to an all-time high of US1.3c, followed by Dent (up 26.6 per cent) and Icon (up 20.3 per cent).

Bitmax Token was the worst performer, falling 18.3 per cent to $US1.67. The token’s value has almost fallen in half from an all-time high of $US3.26 set over the weekend.

Solana, THORChain (RUNE), Kusama, LEO Token and Harmony (ONE) had also hit all-time highs in the past 24 hours, according to Coingecko.

$400k by year-end?

With institutional adoption deepening some Crypto Twitter users were back to making incredibly bullish predictions.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mike McGlone last week posted a chart predicting BTC could peak at $US400,000 ($522,000) this year, based on its bull run in 2017.

That’s an even bolder prediction than the Stock to Flow model that predicts $US288,000 BTC by December.

Scott Minerd, chief investment officer for Guggenheim Partners, also last year predicted $US400,000 Bitcoin, based on the Fed’s “rampant money printing” during the recession.

“It’s based on the scarcity and relative valuation such as things like gold as a percentage of GDP,” Minerd told Bloomberg.

“So … Bitcoin actually has a lot of the attributes of gold and at the same time has an unusual value in terms of transactions,” he said.

Serial Bitcoin entrepreneur Dan Held in a tweetstorm that this bull cycle seemed different than others.

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