One of the first wealth managers to recognize Bitcoin’s potential says he believes the top cryptocurrency will likely reach an $8 trillion market cap.
In a new interview on the Citizen Bitcoin podcast, Andy Edstrom of the California-based investment advisory firm WESCAP Group says a long list of factors may boost Bitcoin (BTC) over the next 10 years. These factors include a fear of missing out on the part of speculators, geopolitical events, the devaluation of fiat currency and catalysts from banks and central governments that create a tipping point and a “speculative attack” on fiat.
“When I set the upside case from an investment point of view, I take a 10-year view. And I think the total valuation on 10 years that I use is about $8 trillion and that comes from various buckets, whether it’s taking share from gold, or taking share from fiat, or taking share from offshore assets, or slightly demonetizing other stores of value like real estate or new uses that we haven’t thought of or are still under construction.
Whether it’s micropayments or things enabled by Lightning, or it’s Abra or similar systems whereby you can get synthetic exposure to any asset in the world just by holding Bitcoin as collateral. So there’s all these areas of upside.”
Edstrom says the fact that Fidelity and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, are offering Bitcoin exposure to their institutional clients has legitimized BTC in a way that smaller cryptocurrency companies could never do.
“If I step across the table back to the dark side where I came from, from the financial establishment, I could care less whether a company named Xapo or a company named BitGo has “qualified custody”. I start to care when Fidelity and the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company are real. So that is, definitely in my mind, a shift. So that’s one thing.
Another factor, of course, is price, as you point out. When we take out the previous all-time high, when we’re back above $20k, that’s going to be a catalyst that some people who aren’t paying attention now will pay attention to. A decade of the best-performing asset, that came out in 2019, is important. I think the excuses for ignoring it are falling away with time.”
When asked how he explains Bitcoin to his clients, Edstrom says he walks them through his vision of what the future looks like if Bitcoin continues to outperform other asset classes and shatters its all-time high.
“One thing I sometimes like to do is invert it. I say, look forward into the future. It’s 2022 or something. And Bitcoin has already plowed through six figures on price. And I’m imagining my conversation with my client and my client is saying, ‘Ok, do we own any Bitcoin?’ No we don’t own any Bitcoin. ‘Oh. So a few years ago it was the best performing asset of the decade right?’ Ya that’s true. ‘And it was uncorrelated to other assets, right? It had less than 0.2 correlation to the US stock market, foreign developed stock markets, emerging markets, bonds as measured by the Barclays index, gold.’ Ya that’s right, it was not correlated. ‘And the total addressable market was in the tens of trillions of dollars, correct?’ Ya that’s correct. ‘And it was investable right? There were instruments in the market that you could buy. You could buy this in my account right?’ Ya that’s true. ‘So what am I paying you for?'”
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