Wall Street’s top strategist, Thomas Lee, who is also a co-founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors, believes the crypto will re-emerge despite a lackluster performance in 2022.
Lee, who appeared in a recent interview with CNBC, said the current crypto bear market is nothing new. He noted that the crypto industry experienced a similar crash in 2018 when Bitcoin lost more than 70% of its value from all-time highs.
“It’s been a horrible year for crypto. No one made money from crypto in 2022,” he said. “But it’s not that different from 2018. If we look at that crypto winter where Bitcoin went from $17,000 to around $1,200, that’s when some of the best projects were created.”
Lee added that the current market downturn is “an important moment” for the industry as it cleans out a lot of bad players. He also stressed that he doesn’t think crypto is dead. Instead, he is confident that crypto will have power because of what it offers.
When asked if he still recommends buying Bitcoin, Lee said yes. “We first wrote about bitcoin in 2017 and recommended people put 1% of their funds into bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin was below $1,000. This holding would now represent 40% of their portfolio without rebalancing. »
Lee remains bullish on Bitcoin
When Lee’s Fundstrat released its first Bitcoin report in 2017, the company predicted that the flagship cryptocurrency could be worth between $15,000 and $50,000 by 2022.
This prediction has largely proven to be true, with Bitcoin trading near the $50,000 mark at the start of the year and falling to around $16,000 in the past two days amid FTX’s collapse. , once the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
In February, Lee shared an even more bullish prediction for Bitcoin, saying the major cryptocurrency could hit $200,000 in the coming years.
At the time, he argued that interest rates will cause bondholders to lose money in the future. Thus, many US investors will allocate their capital to alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies, which could push the price of bitcoin to $200,000.
“The biggest downside of crypto would be an exposed vulnerability in bitcoin, because it’s the most important blockchain and the one with the most value stored on it,” he said.
