Bitcoin forecast to hit $200K by end of 2025: Bernstein Research

Bernstein’s report is the latest in a series of bullish forecasts from institutional market researchers ahead of the November US presential election. 

The price of Bitcoin 

 could go as high as $200,000 by the end of 2025 as the cryptocurrency enters “a new institutional era,” according to an Oct. 22 report by Bernstein Research.

Bernstein’s 160-page “Black Book” makes the case for why Bitcoin miners will continue to consolidate the industry, Matthew Sigel, VanEck’s head of digital asset research, said in an Oct. 23 post on the X platform.

“Ten global asset managers now own ~$60Bn wrapped as regulated [exchange-traded funds] compared with $12Bn in September 2022,” according to the report.

“By 2024 end, we expect Wall Street to replace Satoshi as the top Bitcoin wallet,” Bernstein said.

Bitcoin has dominated the ETF landscape this year, comprising six of the top 10 most successful launches in 2024, according to a post on the X platform by Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store — an investment adviser.

Institutional analysts, including Bernstein, JP Morgan and hedge fund veteran Paul Tudor Jones, are increasingly bullish on BTC ahead of the United States presidential election in November.

Investors are turning toward gold and BTC in a “debasement trade” as they brace for a “catastrophic scenario” amid rising geopolitical tensions, JPMorgan said in an Oct. 3 report.

“Rising geopolitical tensions and the coming [United States] election are likely to reinforce the ‘debasement trade’ thus favoring both gold and Bitcoin,” according to the report, which JPMorgan shared with Cointelegraph.

The so-called debasement trade refers to a spike in gold demand caused by factors ranging from “structurally higher geopolitical uncertainty since 2022, to persistent high uncertainty about the longer-term inflation backdrop, to concerns about […] persistently high government deficits across major economies,” JPMorgan said.

On Oct. 22., Jones, who founded the hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, said he is longing Bitcoin and other commodities because “all roads lead to inflation” after the US presidential election.

“I probably have some basket of gold, Bitcoin, commodities and Nasdaq [technology stocks], and I would own zero fixed income,” Jones said on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin miners are poised to recover from a post-halving slump in mid-2024 as the industry consolidates and cashes in on energy demand from artificial intelligence, according to Bernstein.

“We expect Riot, ClearSpark and Marathon to consolidate the Bitcoin mining industry,” Bernstein said.

The Bitcoin network’s April halving event reduced mining rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block.

Meanwhile, the demand for AI-powered computational power is surging. 

Nick Hansen, CEO of mining firm Luxor, reportedly said miners could earn $2 to $3 from AI per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy expended, compared to $0.15–$0.20 from BTC mining. 

Several Bitcoin miners, including Core Scientific, Hive Digital Technologies and Hut 8, are embracing AI as a secondary revenue source.