- JP Thieriot is the CEO of Uphold, a crypto brokerage firm serving over 4 million clients worldwide.
- He told Insider why he sees bitcoin jump to $ 85,000 in the coming weeks if stocks continue to rise.
- It also shares 5 altcoins with “huge” potential due to their underlying technology.
After witnessing the birth of the internet in tech-driven investment banking Hambrecht & Quist, JP Thieriot discovered bitcoin – the internet’s magic money – in his native Argentina.
After the dot-com boom collapsed, Thieriot was fortunate enough to invest in Argentina’s livestock and land industries during the commodities supercycle of the 2000s.
“What happened was we ended up with a lot of money from American investors in Argentina,” Thieriot recalled in an interview. “Argentina then started to degrade as it does most of the time, and we were really struggling to get our investors’ money out of the country.”
As he began to look for a solution, he encountered bitcoin, which was trading at around $ 8 at the time.
“I was not convinced that I was taking tens of millions of dollars from investors who had committed to an investment in agriculture and ranching, and put them in bitcoin,” he said. . “Obviously that would have been the best financial decision ever.”
In early 2013, a tech entrepreneur he had worked with flew to Argentina and introduced him to bitcoin as “the second coming of the internet”.
“We spent three days in an apartment chatting,” said Thieriot, “and he convinced me enough that I was selling everything in Argentina whatever the offer at the moment.”
From there, the duo launched Bitreserve, which in 2015 was renamed Uphold, a crypto brokerage platform that aggregates prices from 15
liquidity
premises.
“We are linked to all the major exchanges,” he said. “As a result, I think we are aggregating greater liquidity and frankly better executions than any exchange.”
Bitcoin at $ 85,000 in the coming weeks
Bitcoin hit a new high, surpassing $ 66,000 on Wednesday.
While many analysts have attributed the price hike to massive demand and the successful launch of the first bitcoin futures ETF, Thieriot believes the cryptocurrency’s short-term trading outlook is intrinsically tied to the stock market.
“If the equity market continues to rise, it creates the possibility of a bang for bitcoin,” he said. “Both are votes in the sense of saying ‘we don’t trust central bankers to control inflation.'”
Billionaire trader Paul Tudor Jones told CNBC on Wednesday that inflation is “possibly the greatest threat” to financial markets and society in general. The hedge fund titan also said stocks could fall if the Fed tightens monetary policy. The so-called tapering process where the Fed begins to reduce its monthly pace of asset purchases could start in mid-November.
“If there is a massive sell-off of shares, that will likely commit bitcoin to capping at $ 50,000 and $ 60,000,” Thieriot said. “If the stock market, in response to the history of inflation, continues its trend, then I think bitcoin will go from $ 60,000 to $ 85,000 by the end of the year.”
5 altcoins with enormous potential
So far, Uphold has only listed 36 cryptocurrencies, which Thieriot says is the result of “selective criteria” by the company’s rating committee.
Choosing altcoins that offer “huge potential,” he looks for good projects backed by strong underlying technology. That’s why he’s a fan of layer one protocols. Solana (SOL) and Peas (POINT).
Solana is a decentralized blockchain that achieves consensus through a hybrid of proof of story and proof of stake models. It is one of the fastest and cheapest blockchains with over 400 projects covering decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens and Web3 in its ecosystem. The network claims to process more than 50,000 transactions per second. Its SOL token has climbed 10.897% in the past year, according to CoinGecko.
Polkadot was established in 2016 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood. The internet of blockchains is a protocol that aims to allow different public and private blockchains to communicate with each other.
Polkadot said he will go through a key development in November where his parachains will be linked to external blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The ad supercharged its native token, which jumped 71% over the past month.
Thiériot also likes Helium (HNT), which relies on a decentralized network of individual access points to connect low-power Internet of Things devices to the Internet. These hotspots usually generate enough connection for low power devices like air quality sensors, scooter tracking sensors, and animal trackers to connect to the internet. Helium mining has taken off especially among retail investors.
“On a shared economy basis, if they are able to rebuild the global mobile phone infrastructure with a group of participants from the mining base,” he said, “I don’t know what’s the ascending limit for that, but that would be huge. “
He finds projects such as Sandbox (SAND), a decentralized, community-owned virtual world that incorporates equally compelling win-win games and NFTs.
“Sandbox builds a great metaverse and sells meta-real estate. We work with game companies that have eight to 10 million monthly active users and their in-game savings make 15 million transactions per month,” he said. -he declares. “So if this becomes a game or a hobby, then that potential is huge.”
He also shared a newly launched one-layer project called Casper Network (CSPR), which is an open source proof of stake blockchain network that primarily aims to target businesses and developers.
