Investment manager VanEck’s head of Digital Assets Research Matthew Sigel predicts Bitcoin (BTC) will hit $10,000 to $12,000 in the first quarter, which will mark the bottom of the bear market.
Sigel added that prices will fall to these levels “amid a wave of miner bankruptcies.”
Energy crisis renders mining unprofitable
In the company statement, Sigel reported that the MVIS® Global Digital Assets Mining Index median market cap now rests at $180 million, “with nearly all constituents burning cash and trading well below book value.
“With Bitcoin mining largely unprofitable given recent higher electricity prices and lower Bitcoin prices, we predict that many miners with restructure or merge.”
We have already witnessed evidence of this in research carried out by CryptoSlate, revealing that BTC price has recently become cheaper than the all-in-sustaining cost of mining BTC.
Sigel also predicted that Ripple losing the SEC lawsuit “may coincide with this final downdraft, which would take out nearly the entirety of the post-2020 halving bull market.”
VanEck predict BTC to $30K by Q3
Sigel said that following numerous company implosions and poor market sentiment BTC has “traded like a risk asset over the prior year” — has begun to show “price sensitivity to interest rate hikes.”
Sigel linked the causation to a number of aspects including widened sanctions, political response to inflation and micro-management of economic activity to “facilitate the ‘energy transition’.”
Sigel predicts BTC to rise back to $30,000 by the “second half of 2023” with the introduction of lower inflation, easing energy concerns, a possible truce in Ukraine. He added that a turnaround in M2 supply will likely lead to the start of a new bull market.
“Merely a lack of bad crypto-specific news, under the above scenario, could cause the price of Bitcoin to climb a wall of worry back to $30K again.”