Jesse Lund, IBM’s VP of Blockchain and Digital currencies is quite bullish about Bitcoin. So bullish that he actually has a $1 million price target for Bitcoin, which he believes is a very real possibility.
Lund revealed this ambitious long-term Bitcoin price target at the recent Think conference while in an interview with Fred Schebesta.
During the interview, Lund voiced out that the higher the price of a crypto asset, the more utility it has. He followed that up by stating his belief that there should be less focus on the moving prices of crypto and more focus on their utility in the real world.
His exact statement on this was;
“If the price of Bitcoin were higher, there would be more liquidity on the network; we could be having a really different discussion with banks right now,”
He added that crypto prices were being affected adversely by speculators because “because they’re thinking about it wrong.”
Lund went on to make an eye brow raising remark later in the interview where he predicted that the price of Bitcoin will be $5,000 by the 31st of December this year.
His long-term outlook though is worlds apart from his 2019 prediction.
“I have a long-term outlook. It goes back to that discussion about the utility of the network with a higher price. I see Bitcoin at a million dollars someday. I like that number because if Bitcoin’s at a million dollars, then the satoshi is on value parity with the US penny. And that means there’s over $20 trillion of liquidity in this network. Think about $20 trillion in liquidity and how that changes things like corporate payments.”
Lund’s view is that when the price of Bitcoin goes high enough, major banks pay attention which makes the utility of the token increase at its core value proposition-less expensive transfers of value.
Both IBM and R3 Corda are working hard to create solutions for international payments using digital assets. IBM also recently launched its World wire product which partly relies on major crypto-currency stellar.
Lund explained the usefulness of stellar in cross-border payments despite its relatively smaller market cap by saying;
“There’s no technical reason or technical barriers that should prevent money from flowing the same way [as information]. The architecture of World Wire is really a cross-border payment network, the magic of which, if you will, the novelty of it, is the ability to send payment instructions saying, ‘Hey, I’m sending you something, get ready.’ And on the other end, the receiver is making sure that who you’re sending it to is not some nefarious actor or bad actor.”
He went on to say;
“Once that happens, and that happens really fast, then we send the value along with it. That transfer of value is made possible by digital instruments, settlement instruments, of which Lumens is one. So we see Lumens as a viable settlement instrument in this ecosystem of cross-border payments.”
It’s quite rare for a person belonging to the old world of technology to this Bullish about crypto. Who knows what would happen if more of the likes him were to give such Bullish outlooks on crypto.
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