Bloomberg – Bitcoin, a ‘Risk-Off’ Asset, will Hit $400,000 in 2021

Bitcoin (BTC) continues to receive scathing criticism for its price volatility, but a Bloomber analyst trusts that it is slowly transforming into a “risk-off” option for investors. A tweet on March 25 by Mike McGlone, senior commodity analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, indicates that the year is a landmark for largest cryptocurrency.

To support his views, McGlone has uploaded a price chart of the BTC/USD and the Bitcoin Liquid Index, a price ticker mainly developed for institutional purpose. He wrote “Well on its way to becoming a global digital reserve asset, a maturation leap in 2021 may be transitioning Bitcoin toward a risk-off asset, in our view.”

Using the chart, an inference based on price action trend gives a value of $400,000 per Bitcoin before the end of this year. The forecast eclipses other predictions, including stock-to-flow, which forecasts an average of $288,000 sometime before the end of 2024.

McGlone did not list out the factors contributing to Bloomberg’s assumption, but the thought of Bitcoin minimizing, instead of boosting, portfolio risk is the main discussion point among large enterprises. There are frequent reports of treasury department of companies setting aside liquid funds for purchase of Bitcoins and there is not a great concern about short-term price fluctuations.

While speaking to TIME, Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy and one of the largest holders of Bitcoin, said “My mission right now is to fix the balance sheets of the world.”

Saylor was instrumental in making several enterprises invest in Bitcoin with its huge investment last summer. As of date, roughly $52 billion has been invested by enterprises in Bitcoin, and the current aggregate value of the assets, based on Bitcoin’s price of about $53,000, is more than $73 billion as per data provided by tracking resource Bitcoin Treasuries.

Just before Morgan Stanley turned out to be the foremost top bank to provide access to Bitcoin funds for rich investors, cynics were complaining and questioning Bitcoin’s value with the routine theories of the past.

Renowned gold advocate Peter Schiff said “Morgan Stanley limiting crypto access to 2.5% of high net worth individual accounts, that have over $2 million in assets and have been active for over six months, shows that the bank realizes Bitcoin is very risky and wants to limit legal liability from investors who lose money.”

In the meantime, Fed Chair Jerome Powell equated Bitcoin with gold and called the former as a substitute for the yellow metal. Powell, while causing uneasiness to Schiff, has opined that it does not pose a threat to the greenback or to financial sturdiness.

Notably, average returns for Bitcoin/US dollar is over 200% per year since the launch of the numero uno cryptocurrency.