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The price of bitcoin could soar to new record highs over the next few years thanks to a demand boom from the potential approval of ETFs, according to Fundstrat's Tom Lee.
In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Lee said bitcoin could jump to a range of $100,000 to $150,000 in the next 12 months, and in the next five years, the cryptocurrency could soar to as high as $500,000.
Those price targets would eclipse the record high of $69,000 reached in November 2021 and would represent an increase of as much as 1,011% from bitcoin's current price of about $45,000.
"There's a finite supply and now we have a potentially huge increase in demand with a spot bitcoin [ETF] approval, so I think in five years something around half a million would be potentially achievable," Lee said.
The potential approval of spot bitcoin ETFs by the SEC is important because spot bitcoin ETFs would hold bitcoin as an underlying asset in the fund, unlike bitcoin futures ETFs that trade bitcoin futures contracts and don't hold the crypto as an underlying asset.
Spot bitcoin ETFs should make the cryptocurrency more accessible to investors and financial advisors that haven't jumped through the hoops of opening up an account with a crypto custodian, buying the crypto directly, and dealing with different types of storage for the asset.
Instead, a spot bitcoin ETF would allow a large swath of investors to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency from the comfort of their already established brokerage accounts.
Lee isn't the only Wall Street analyst with high expectations for the price of bitcoin if the SEC approves spot bitcoin ETFs. Standard Chartered said the cryptocurrency could soar to $200,000 by the end of 2025 on the assumption that the ETFs will attract between $50 billion and $100 billion in funds from investors during their first year of trading.
