Bitcoin may be struggling to break back above $60,000, but Morgan Creek Capital Management’s Mark Yusko is aiming even higher.
The investment management firm’s founder and chief investment officer predicts the cryptocurrency could reach $250,000 within five years. He says the key is it’s so much more than just a token of value –something he believes many investors overlook and underestimate.
“It’s just about network adoption and increased usage,” Yusko told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday. “This is a network and networks grow in an exponential way. This is the fastest network in history to a trillion dollars of value, right on the heels of the FAANGS that took, you know, 15 to 20 years depending on which one you look at.”
Yusko bases his $250k target on a gold equivalence. If gold’s monetary value is $4 trillion, then digital gold should move up to that total – a sum that puts the price at a quarter of a $1 million per coin.
“What people miss is this is a technological evolution of computing power that isn’t going away,” he said. “It is a powerful computing network that is going to become the base layer protocol for the Internet of value.”
It’s not just bitcoin that has rallied this year. Litecoin and Ethereum are both up triple digits, while ‘meme’ crypto Dogecoin has gained more than 13,000%.
Bitcoin is still the gold standard in the crypto world, though, says Yusko. He likens it to the way in which the internet functions. Bitcoin is the base layer protocol like TCP/IP, the foundation that allows computers to connect and communicate, while a crypto like Ethereum is akin to ‘www dot’, the “toolkit” to build upon that foundation.
“So, yes, there’s room for a couple of protocols to survive, but there are 1000s of coins and Doge is in that category that really are useless, they’re just utility tokens that have no underlying value or use case and they’ll eventually disappear,” said Yusko.
Bitcoin is up 98% in 2021. It has struggled in the past month, though, rising little more than 2%.