The Re-do’s That Went Under the Radar
- Citi started the year with a $143,000 base case and cut its target first to $112,000. Then on July 1, it lowered its 12-month bitcoin target to $82,000. The bank also cut its assumption for net exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows to zero from $10 billion, and set a bear case at $53,000.
- Standard Chartered moved earlier and analyst Geoffrey Kendrick lowered the bank’s year-end target to $100,000 from $150,000 and warned bitcoin could first drop “to $50,000 or just below.” By August, he had swung the other way, saying there was a risk his year-end forecast (of $100K) was “too low.”
- Bernstein kept the $150,000 number but moved the date. Its August note now sees bitcoin around $125,000 by end-2026, with $150,000 arriving by mid-2027.
Then there is Chamath, who started off the year with a $500,000 call but has since warned that bitcoin will hit zero, arguing quantum computing could eventually break it.
The Holdouts
Not everyone has blinked however, and Tom Lee told the Consensus 2026 crowd in Miami (earlier this year in May) that bitcoin could trade between $150,000 and $200,000 by year-end. “Crypto Spring, in our view, has commenced,” he said at the time.
Similarly, the most recent forecasts are much closer to where bitcoin actually trades and Coinmarketcap’s head of research, Alice Liu, expects bitcoin to end the year between $85,000 and $92,000.
The Math
Using a spot price of about $80,100, this is what each camp needs by Dec. 31:
- $92,000 (Coinmarketcap’s upper bound): about +15%.
- $100,000 (Standard Chartered): about +25%.
- $125,000 (Bernstein’s revised base case): about +56%.
- $150,000 (the old consensus): about +87%.
- $200,000 (Tom Lee’s upper end): about +150%.
And while 25% jumps are quite routine in the crypto realm, especially across a two-month span, the near-term tape is not helping. To elaborate, bitcoin’s price sank to $79,146 over the weekend while spot bitcoin ETFs just posted their biggest outflow since June. Not only that, a fresh Federal Reserve decision lands this week, which has many onlookers on the edge of their seats.
