Wall Street Analyst Sees Bitcoin Surging to $25k Despite China Exchange Ban

Major Wall Street analyst Thomas Lee, the co-founder Fundstrat Global Advisors, appeared on CNBC’s Fast Money and reaffirmed his short-term price target of $25,000, despite the nationwide ban on bitcoin exchanges issued by the Chinese government and its financial regulators.

By the end of October, merely less than three weeks ago, bitcoin price reached $5,000 for the first time in history. The integration of the BItcoin Core development team’s transaction malleability and scaling solution Segregated Witness (SegWit) was showing evident effect on the scalability of bitcoin, drastically decreasing the size of the bitcoin mempool and average block size to 0.57MB.

More to that, leading financial institutions including the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the largest options exchange in the US, established strategic partnership with regulated bitcoin exchanges such as Gemini to provide a better infrastructure for institutional and retail traders.

Tyler Winklevoss, the co-founder and CEO of Gemini, stated:

“Gemini’s key concerns in the cryptocurrency ecosystem have always been security, compliance, and regulatory oversight. By working with the team at CBOE, we are helping to make bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies increasingly accessible to both retail and institutional investors.”

However, the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, banned initial coin offerings (ICOs) and eventually bitcoin exchanges operating within China, causing a major correction on bitcoin price to occur. Within two weeks, bitcoin price went from surpassing $5,000 to dipping below $3,000. Already, bitcoin price has rebounded to over $3,760 due to the confidence of the market over bitcoin to recover.

Like many analysts in the cryptocurrency sector, Lee believes bitcoin price will still surge to $25,000 in the short-term. Lee explained:

“There are only about 300,000 holders of at least $5,000 of bitcoin. That is like saying the iPhone was a bubble in 2007 four days into the sale because there were 500,000 iPhones sold. Bitcoin is a protocol. Meaning, the actual network itself is generating the value so that the Visa of bitcoin is not going to be as valuable as the blockchain network itself. And that is why, for instance, to make a fraudulent transaction on bitcoin today, it would cost almost $30 billion to create one fake bitcoin.”

Lee further emphasized that the growing presence and mainstream adoption of bitcoin are being deemed as threats to major financial institutions because the decentralized nature of bitcoin renders the existence of mediators and third party service providers useless.

While bitcoin has decreased in value because of the exit of a major market in China, it is important to acknowledge the fact that the Chinese bitcoin exchange market only accounted for around 10 to 13 percent of global bitcoin trades. Hence, bitcoin traders that are realizing the actual magnitude of the bitcoin exchange ban by the Chinese government are purchasing bitcoin again and fueling a buyback. As a result, bitcoin was able to rebound so quickly after the finalization of the ban.

In the upcoming months, as Lee explained, the growing demand from institutional investors and professional traders will only increase, bringing bitcoin price to new highs.