Bitcoin [BTC] institutional investors “all in”, $50,000 by EOY 2018, says Anthony Pompliano

Bitcoin Anthony Pompliano, known better by his nickname ‘Pomp’, said that he has a “high degree of confidence” that the price of Bitcoin [BTC] will hit $50,000 in the future. In a recent interview, Pompliano elaborated upon his reasons for coming to this conclusion.

Notably, Pompliano is a founder and partner at venture capitalist firm Morgan Creek Digital Assets. The fund manages an institutional hedge fund with a diversified portfolio, and an ‘alternative investment fund’, with major holdings in bonds and real estate. Recently, the firm entered into a partnership with CityBlock Capital. Cityblock aims to build a VC firm that is in tune with today’s digital age.

In a statement to Cheddar, Pompliano stated:

“ I think I have got a high degree of confidence that Bitcoin will hit $50000 sometime in the future…I’ve got some degree of confidence that it’ll be at the end of this year.”

He added that there was “probably [a] 30-40%” that the price would reach $50,000 by the end of this year. He also mentioned this in a tweet, where he said:

“I’ve stuck to my $50000 Bitcoin price target for end of year 2018. Still have high confidence on the $50000 number. The timeframe is the big unknown. The next 5 months will be fun to watch.”

Furthermore, he spoke about the reasons for saying so, quoting the first one as being “human psychology”. Pompliano stated that $50,000 was the “next big round number”, which will drive the price to his prediction. On the rumors of the decision to be made by the United States Securities and Exchanges Commission [SEC] regarding an exchange-traded fund [ETF] backed by Bitcoin, he stated:

“There’s a lot of speculation on the new ETF decision, [but] I don’t think it’ll get approved in the next 30 days or so. There’s a lot of people excited about that.”

Pomp’s third reason for making the prediction was that there was a lot of institutional money moving into the market. He stated:

“You can see institutional money coming into funds and futures contracts so you’re starting to see really big volume in some of these products. I think that’s going to drive the price of the asset.”

When asked about the interest shown by Blackrock and other institutions in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, Anthony elaborated upon the kinds of institutional investors in the space currently. He stated that there were two kinds, those that contribute capital to the cryptocurrency market, and those that build technology for the space. Pompliano stated:

“The ones putting capital are already in. We got an institutional investor in one of our funds, they are all in, they understand the value, they’re looking for higher yielding products. I think we’ve already checked the box in a lot of these different products of institutional interest.”

On building technology for the cryptocurrency market, Pompliano provided perspective on the “move to a digital world”. He stated:

“Moving to a digital world, legacy financial institutions have to have digital products and interfaces or they’re going to get left behind. It’s a matter of survival for incumbents to digitize what they’re doing or they’ll be deemed irrelevant.”

Twitter user TruthRaider commented:

“He will win this one.”

Twitter user MOI, however, seemed skeptical, stating:

“and this is why I’m sticking with $3k; as a company we do international payments, we want to use bitcoin, but it’s just way too risky, expensive and unreliable … so, we’re stuck with paypal and bank transfers; bitcoin is not ready yet to be used as a currency, end of story”