The boldest bitcoin price predictions for 2023

2022 is a tough year for crypto. More than $1.3 trillion has been wiped off the market value. And bitcoin, the world’s largest digital coin, saw its value drop by more than 60%.

Investors were caught by the wave of collapse in the industry from the stablecoin project terraUSD to the crypto exchange FTX, as well as the worsening macroeconomic climate. Those who made predictions about the price of bitcoin last year were completely off the mark.

But with 2023 now, some market players have stuck their necks with phone prices for what could be another volatile year.

Interest rates around the world are rising, and weighing on risk assets like stocks and bitcoin. Investors are also watching how the FTX saga, which led to the arrest of the company’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas, will develop.

CNBC gathers some of the boldest price calls for bitcoin in 2023.

Bull Bitcoin Tim Draper has one of the most optimistic calls about bitcoin in 2022, predicting that the token will reach $250,000 by the end of the year.

In November, the billionaire venture capitalist said he extended the timeline for his prediction to mid-2023. Even after FTX collapsed, he was confident the coin would reach a quarter of a million.

“My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending, and only 1 in 7 bitcoin wallets are currently held by women that the dam will break,” Draper told CNBC via email.

Bitcoin needs to rally 1,400% to trade at that level.

Although prices are depressed and trading volume is drying up, there may be reason to suspect that the market has found a bottom, according to Draper.

“I suspect that the halving in 2024 will be positive,” he said.

Halvening, or halving, is an event that happens every four years where the bitcoin reward for miners is cut in half. This is seen by some investors as positive for the price of bitcoin, as it reduces supply. The next halving is scheduled to occur in 2024.

Bitcoin miners, who use power-intensive machines to verify transactions and mint new tokens, are being squeezed by the slump in prices and rising energy costs.

The actor amassed a huge pile of digital currency, making him the biggest seller in the market. With miners releasing their holdings to pay off debt, that should remove most of the remaining selling pressure on bitcoin.

This is a good historical sign for bitcoin, said Vijay Ayyar, vice president of corporate development at crypto exchange Luno.

“In previous down markets, the miner’s capitulation usually represents a major bottom,” Ayyar told CNBC. “The cost of generating it becomes greater than the value of bitcoin, so you have some miners shutting down their machines…

“If the market reaches a point where it sufficiently absorbs the selling pressure of miners, one can assume that we are looking at a fundamental period.”

For some market participants, the worst is yet to come.

In a Dec. 5 research note, Standard Chartered said bitcoin may fall to $5,000. The prediction, one of the list of “surprises” of banks that are “undervalued” by the market, will show a drop of 70% from the current price.

“Produce a plunge along with technology shares” in Standard Chartered’s nightmare 2023 scenario, “and when the Bitcoin sell-off decelerates, the damage is done,” said Eric Robertsen, the bank’s head of global research.

“Many more companies and crypto exchanges find themselves with insufficient liquidity, leading to further bankruptcies and the collapse of investor confidence in digital assets,” he said.

Robertsen said the scenario has “non-zero probability of occurrence in the year ahead” and falls “materially outside the market consensus or our own baseline views.”

Veteran investor Mark Mobius is successful in 2022 in terms of value. In May, he predicted bitcoin would drop to $20,000 when it traded above $28,000.

They said bitcoin would drop to $10,000 in 2022. That didn’t happen. However, Mobius told CNBC that he plans to pay $10,000 in 2023.

The investor, who made his name at Franklin Templeton Investments, told CNBC that the bear case for bitcoin stems from rising interest rates and tighter monetary policy from the US Federal Reserve.

“With higher interest rates, the appeal of holding or buying Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies becomes less attractive because simply holding coins does not pay interest,” Mobius said via email.

Carol Alexander, professor of finance at the University of Sussex, is not far from predicting that bitcoin will fall to $10,000 in 2022.

Now, they think that cryptocurrency can be set to make a profit – but not for the reasons they might expect.

The catalyst will be more dominoes from the FTX fallout tipping over, Alexander said. If that happens, he expects the price of bitcoin to exceed $30,000 in the first quarter, and then $50,000 by the third or fourth quarter.

“There will be a managed bull market in 2023, not a bubble — so we won’t see prices overshooting like before,” he told CNBC.

“We will see one or two months of stable trend prices interspersed with a few-limit period and probably some short-lived crashes.”

Alexander’s reason is that, with trading volumes evaporating with traders on the edge, the big owners known as “whales” are likely to move to support the rise of the market. The 97 richest bitcoin wallet addresses account for 14.15% of the total supply, according to fintech company River Financial.

Some investors have given up trying to predict the price of bitcoin. For Antoni Trenchev, CEO of the crypto credit platform Nexo, these recent events are an exciting moment.

Bitcoin is on a “positive path” earlier in 2022, with institutional adoption increasing, but “some major forces are disturbing,” he said.

Trenchev once predicted that bitcoin would rise to a peak of $100,000 in early 2023. Now, he has finished trying to predict the price.

Laith Khalaf, a financial analyst at AJ Bell, suggests that efforts to forecast the price of bitcoin are futile.

“We can sit here and say this time next year and it could be at $5,000 or $50,000 just wouldn’t be surprised because the market is very driven by sentiment,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”