Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead has revealed he believes the price of bitcoin will be trading between $80,000 and $90,000 by the end of the year, and that it will rise to over $120,000 within a year.

Morehead told the Reuters Global Markets Forum that increased mainstream adoption could help the flagship cryptocurrency’s price surpass $700,000 in the next decade. To the CEO, increased regulatory scrutiny such as the crackdown on leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance is part of a “transition phase.”

Pantera, which manages $2.8 billion in blockchain-related assets, has invested in some leading cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase and Bitstamp. The firm has been attracting institutional investors that are less momentum-oriented than retail investors, Morehead said.

Despite his bullish stance on Bitcoin, Morehead believes that Ethereum will outpace the flagship cryptocurrency thanks to numerous upgrades it has coming up. During the Reuters Global Markets Forum, the CEO said that the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 upgrade will help the cryptocurrency trade more like a fixed asset.

EIP 1559 will see Ethereum reform its fee market with two key changes: one will replace the current gas limit with two values: one equal to it for a “long-term average target,” and another with a hard “per-block cap.” It will also add a basefee required to be paid in transactions that will be burned instead of paid to miners. IT’s adjusted on a block-by-block basis to keep “average block gas usage” at a “level close to the current gas limit.”

To Morehead, the upgrade will see some store their wealth in ETH rather than BTC:

You’ll see a transition of people who want to store wealth, doing it in (ether) rather than just bitcoin.

Ethereum’s upcoming transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain, which will reduce its energy consumption, will also attract investors, along with the network’s decentralized finance applications.

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The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
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