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After months of speculation, the Securities and Exchange Commission finally gave its seal of approval to 11 spot bitcoin ETFs Wednesday – and crypto bulls have pinpointed the regulator's move as a potential catalyst to push its price above six figures for the first time.
UK bank Standard Chartered and Fundstrat perma-bull Tom Lee are among the names who charted a path for bitcoin to pass $100,000 in the run-up to the SEC's announcement, while other analysts called January 10 a "watershed moment" and a "'game changer' for crypto".
Market reaction has been muted so far, with the large-cap token ticking up under 1% Thursday – but that could be a classic case of investors "buying the rumor and selling the news". Bitcoin has jumped 70% since late October as chatter surrounding the SEC's decision started to intensify, and is currently trading at its highest price in nearly two years.
It'd still have to double in price again to reach $100,000 – but some believe that milestone could be reached by the end of 2024, with regulated spot ETFs likely to draw big-name institutional investors into the crypto space.
Standard Chartered is one high-profile firm that's particularly bullish on bitcoin. Earlier this month, strategists at the bank predicted that spot ETFs could drive between $50 billion and $100 billion worth of inflows for the token this year – and set a $200,000 price target for the end of 2025.
Meanwhile, Fundstrat's Lee said in a CNBC interview the day the SEC announced its decision that he's expecting the token to climb to between $100,000 and $150,000 over the next 12 months – and to soar to $500,000 over the next five years.
"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 told the outlet.
University of Sussex economist Carol Alexander, who successfully called bitcoin's slump in 2022 and surprise resurgence last year, isn't setting her sights so high – but still expects the cryptocurrency to be priced between $70,000 and $100,000 at the end of December.
"I think it's an excellent thing for bitcoin bulls in the short term — I've never been as bullish as this," she told Business Insider in an interview Wednesday.
Not all of the financial world is convinced by those lofty price targets, though.
Former PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian said in a post on X Thursday that while the SEC's approval could be a "game changer" for cryptocurrency, it wasn't likely to promote bitcoin's usage more widely.
"As notable as all these factors are for anchoring crypto in the investment world, they do not significantly propel its role as a potential global currency," he wrote. "The outlook here remains more constrained."
Even the SEC itself appears skeptical about bitcoin's potential as an investment. In a separate statement Wednesday, chair Gary Gensler called the token "primarily a speculative, volatile asset that's also used for illicit activity including ransomware, money laundering, sanction evasion, and terrorist financing."
