The price forecast of Bitcoin from Standard Chartered puts the value of the pioneer cryptocurrency at $120,000 by the end of 2024.
This means that the British multinational bank expects Bitcoin to see its price rise by a whopping 300% from its current value.
The prediction
According to the report, the bank believes that the price of Bitcoin would mostly rise because of miners, who would start hoarding their tokens and not add them to the circulating supply in the market.
One of the top FX analysts of Standard Chartered, Geoff Kendrick, wrote that when miner profitability increases for every mined Bitcoin, it means they will maintain cash inflows and sell less.
This means that the net supply of BTC reduces and pushes up its prices. For now, there has been an increase of 82% in the token’s price from year to date.
On January 1st, the price of BTC stood at $16,600 and at publishing time, the largest token in the market was trading at $30,280.
Miners receive 6.25 BTC for every block they mine and this bullish momentum in the crypto market has boosted the revenue of the industry since the beginning of the year.
As a matter of fact, it has helped in reversing the negative momentum that had been seen in the previous year because of declining revenue.
The decline
In June last year, the opposite trend had become apparent when the declining price of Bitcoin forced prominent miners like Riot and Core Scientific to sell off most of their holdings on the market.
This resulted in BTC’s free fall which saw it go below $18,000. Today, there is good reason for miners to believe that there is an early upswing in the price of Bitcoin once more.
Glassnode, the on-chain analytics firm, published data showing that in the last few months, a substantial number of BTC tokens have shifted from short-term holders to long-term ones.
This trend has been seen every time before Bitcoin bull markets in the past. Long-term holders refer to entities that hold their coins for more than 155 days and show less activity in the near term.
Other details
It should also be noted that smaller entities that hold less than 1 BTC, which are called ‘Shrimps’, have also begun to stack sats harder than they had done before the 2017 bull market hit its peak.
This category is actually controlling more tokens every month than what is produced by miners. Estimates from Kendrick show that 100% of the newly minted coins are currently being sold by miners for covering costs.
But, if the price of BTC reaches $50,000 by the year-end, then miners would only sell 20% to 30% of their mined tokens.
This would reduce the market supply of BTC and result in a bullish feedback loop. Currently, Kendrick said that miners are selling 900 BTC every day.
But, if the price rises, then they would sell just 180 to 270 BTC daily, which is a significant difference.