The infamous trader behind the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Jordan Belfort, has made bullish bitcoin and ether price predictions while predicting that “massive” regulations for the cryptocurrency space would allow the cryptocurrencies to go mainstream.

In a wide-ranging interview with CoinDesk, Belfort noted that he believes “massive” regulations in the cryptocurrency space could be beneficial for bitcoin, ether, and stablecoins, and added fears of regulations are misguided. He pointed to regulators taming the junk bond market and its growth after that happened.

Addressing the leading stablecoin tether, Belfort doubled down on his longstanding criticism of the cryptocurrency, claiming it’s a scam and that he is “shocked” by how little legal action has been taken so far about USDT.

The stablecoin now has over 61 billion tokens in circulation, and as the issuance of new coins grew exponentially with BTC’s price rise Belfort implied new coins could be created to pump the cryptocurrency. In 2018, Belfort had said he suspected USDT was a “massive fraud” used to pump BTC’s price.

Some academics have reached similar conclusions, while others differed from it. Tether and its sister company Bitfinex has always denied being involved in any sort of market manipulation and said “issuances cannot be used to prop up the price of Bitcoin or any other coin/token on Bitfinex.”

During the interview, Belfort also criticized unrealistic price targets for both bitcoin and ether, saying these are used to stir up hype and are disconnected from the bull case for cryptocurrencies. He noted he owns both assets and believes BTC “definitely has a great chance of being looked at as digital gold.”

Per his words, by the end of the year he sees BTC trade between $45,000 and $70,000, and ETH trade between $3,700 and $4,500. Earlier this year, Belfort predicted BTC would rally to $100,000 after changing his previously critical stance.

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