BTC looks ready to hit a new ATH. Here's what 50 experts say it will do next

With Bitcoin looking poised to blow past its all-time high this week – or even today – the question on many crypto buffs’ lips is what will happen next, in the final months of a stupendous year for cryptocurrencies.

Well, no one has a crystal ball, but one panel of 50 industry experts is predicting that BTC will peak at US$80,021 before finishing 2021 at US$71,415.

BTC ATH?

It’s the Finder panel’s predictions for the rest of the decade that might really cause jaws to drop, though. They forecast BTC trading at US$249,578 at the end of 2025 and a whopping US$5.2 million at the end of 2030.

This morning BTC was changing hands at US$64,162, just 0.6 per cent below its all-time high of US$64,805 set back in mid-April.

The original crypto has risen 3.6 per cent in the past 24 hours as the first Bitcoin futures ETF made a strong debut on the New York Stock Exchange in the overnight hours.

The panel was polled in late September and early October, before it was clear that the US Securities and Exchange Commission would approve the ETF, which has been a bullish catalyst for BTC.

Bitcoin ‘will dethrone gold’

Forty-six per cent of the panel said it was time to buy, an equal number said it was time to hold and just eight per cent said it was time to sell.

Among the ‘BTC ATH’ group was CoinFlip founder and chief advisor Daniel Polotsky, who predicted Bitcoin would end the year at US$80,000.

“As Bitcoin continues to mature and increase in value, usability, age and trust, it will behave less like a growth stock, and more like a gold-like store of value,” he wrote.

“Eventually Bitcoin will dethrone gold as the king of safe-haven assets, and hopefully this changing of the guard takes place by the end of the decade.”

‘This bull run is different’

Gryphon Digital Mining CEO and director Rob Chang forecast that BTC would peak at $111,000 this year on the back of widespread usage.

“I believe we are in the opening stages of rapid bitcoin adoption that will spread past El Salvador and Twitter and into more traditional areas,” he wrote.

“As this occurs, the general public will be increasingly exposed to bitcoin and this shift from obscurity into the mainstream will catapult bitcoin prices higher for the next few years,”

The prediction is a bit lower than the $107,484 peak and $94,967 finish the group predicted in April, although the constituents of the group have grown since then.

First Digital Trust chief operating officer Gunnar Jaerv put an end-of-year prediction of US$70,000, about the average.

“The bull run is different this year,” he said. “More innovations, more regulatory involvement (despite FUD) and the ecosystem and infrastructure puzzles are falling into place quite nicely.”

Read the panel’s full report here.