“And I think 2021, 2022, 2023… it’s going to take two to three years maybe four years for this sort of cycle to hit the peak.. I kind of predict that we are just in the flat part of the wave. The big wave hasn’t come in yet.”
The Binance CEO states that the prevailing cryptocurrency market cycle, which lures a range of players, seems to be in price discovering stage.
“Now, we are basically in discovery territory again. Bitcoin broke the previous all-time high which was there for three years. Now, we are in the $30,000+ territory, so we went to $42,000 and are coming back… This time around we see a lot more users, a lot more institutional participation. Before this was the peak, now this is the foundation.”
Zhao trusts Bitcoin could rally by 5x to 20x from the current price level in the years to come.
“I think it’s going to go another 5X, 10X, 20X… we don’t know. And if that happens, it’s going to take a couple of years. We will see.”
The Binance CEO details that his outlook is based on Bitcoin’s price movement over the past ten years.
“In the history of Bitcoin, if you look at the Bitcoin price in 2013, it broke the $200 all-time high and then it went to $1,000. So that took about a year… a year and a half. So it takes some time… And then we saw a big drop in 2013 from $1,000 to $200 in 2014 to 2015-ish. It took until 2016 to break that high and then in 2016 we passed $1,000 and then it went to $3,000. In 2017, it went to $20,000. So we see a 20X jump over a three to four year period.”
When enquired whether he would classify the volume that is recorded in the cryptocurrency markets as “mania”, CZ stated that he does not feel that the industry has gone to that level as of now.
“Based on the data I can see, I don’t think we’ve seen the mania just yet… Even though the price has caught up to the previous peak, people are coming in more much more steadily. On a day-to-day basis we don’t see a super big spike of new users coming in… even though the prices go [parabolic] we haven’t seen the user sign-ups take that kind of peak.”