Standard Chartered lowers bitcoin projection to $100,000, sees bottom at $50,000 “in the next few months”
“Bitcoin prices will chop around for a few months, as we are lacking any strong active catalysts on the horizon.”
Standard Chartered lowered its Bitcoin forecast to $100,000 by year-end, down from $150,000, and expects to see bitcoin drop to $50,000 “in the next few months.”
“I think we are going to see more pain and a final capitulation period for digital asset prices in the next few months. The macro backdrop is unlikely to provide support until we near Warsh taking over at the Fed,” Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, wrote in a February 12 note.
Kendrick said the average bitcoin ETF holding is now down 25%, and, amid a macro backdrop becoming more challenging, “holders are more likely to sell, rather than buy the dip, for now.”
Bitcoin was still stuck around the $67,000 level on Thursday morning, unable to yet recover from last week’s bloodbath, and down 46% from its October 6 all-time high. Meanwhile, bitcoin ETFs were back in the red with $276.3 million in outflows on Wednesday, according to SoSoValue.
Pratik Kala, portfolio manager and head of research at Apollo Crypto, told Sherwood News that he expects bitcoin prices to “chop around” for a few months, as we are lacking any strong active catalysts on the horizon.
He said he is “expecting a lot of distribution and volumes forming a strong base between the 58K-68K range before the next move higher.”
Glassnode analysts said that, similar to Q2 2022, bitcoin’s price will range within the Realized Price and True Market Mean corridor, “as time and further compression are required for new buyers to emerge and gradually accumulate supply.”
“A meaningful regime shift, in the short-term, would likely require an out-of-ordinary catalyst, either a decisive reclaim of the True Market Mean near $79.2k, signaling renewed structural strength, or a systemic dislocation similar to LUNA or FTX that forces price below the Realized Price around $55k. In the absence of such extremes, a prolonged phase of range-bound absorption remains the most probable path for the mid-term market,” Glassnode wrote in the February 11 report.
Glassnode analysts also said that the Short-Term Holders Supply in Profit metric indicates the most recent buyers remain underwater.
“This subdued profitability underscores a structurally fragile environment, where upside momentum may struggle to sustain without meaningful demand expansion,” they wrote.
Short- to mid-term (“next few months” is the mantra) sentiment remains subdued, as several experts agree that bitcoin will continue to be weighed down by macro risks and uncertainty.
Nic Puckrin, cofounder of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood that bitcoin weakness looks set to continue at least for the coming months, and he still expects it will bottom out around the $55,700 to $58,200 range, “so close enough to Standard Chartered’s projection.”
“Given the uncertainty in markets right now, it’s hard to predict when BTC will hit $100K again. However, when bitcoin does recover, there will almost certainly be a significant amount of resistance around the $100K level once again,” he said.
Finally, Glassnode data also shows that bitcoin’s collapse last week “led to the largest realised loss in history at $3.2bn,” as Puckrin noted on X.
