Wedbush Securities has revised its 12-month projections for the price of bitcoin, revealing it expects the price to rise to $600 over the next year.
The estimate represents a revision of a $400 price projection issued in June. At the time, the financial services firm indicated its belief the share price for the Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC), the first publicly traded bitcoin fund, could rise to $40 over the next 12 months. This figure has been revised upwards to $60 in the latest report.
Report authors Gil Luria and Aaron Turner stated that they believe the sharp increase in bitcoin’s value observed over the past week has been the result of “broad, positive media coverage” and the continued investment and interest from large financial institutions.
Luria and Turner further asserted that they believe the bitcoin blockchain will come to serve as an Internet for financial services, and that alternative distributed ledgers, such as those being developed by Chain, R3 and Ripple, will serve a more narrow set of use cases.
The report reads:
“We believe the reason financial institutions are insisting on ‘blockchain not bitcoin’ is for internal and regulatory compliance. We expect that even the narrow solutions leveraging only a distributed ledger will end up being anchored on the bitcoin blockchain sooner or later.”
Elsewhere, Wedbush left most of its more forward-looking projections on the share of the online payments, remittance, banking services and microtransactions markets it believes bitcoin services will capture unchanged.
However, there were signs that recent developments had influenced the firm’s future outlooks.
For example, Wedbush increased its estimate for the “total BTC monetary base” required to support these uses cases by 2025, as well as the expected value of use cases for the bitcoin network outside what it expects to be its four core markets.
The full Wedbush Securities report can be found below:
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