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[Bitcoin market price]
Looking back at 2023 and outlook for the market in 2024
I'm Masamichi Matsushima, a.k.a. Marin, a cryptocurrency analyst at Monex Securities. This time, I'll be looking back at the Bitcoin market and giving my outlook for the future.
Bitcoin in 2023 started to rise from the 2.1 million yen range at the beginning of the year, as the aftereffects of the FTX shock subsided sooner than expected.
When a series of emerging US banks collapsed in March, there were temporary declines, but the damage did not spread due to prompt government compensation, and buying momentum quickly returned. In June, BlackRock applied for a Bitcoin spot ETF in the United States, and the price soared due to expectations.
After that, the upside was suppressed due to the postponement of the ETF review and the rise in US interest rates, but toward the end of the year, favorable factors related to the ETF review continued, and the FOMC suggested a change to a rate cut in 2024, causing the price to rise to the 6 million yen range.
Bitcoin is expected to continue its upward trend in 2024. Approval of a physical ETF is expected in the United States in January or March, and the fourth "halving" in which new issuance will be halved is scheduled for around April. In the past three halvings, the tightening of supply and demand after the halving caused a bubble market over the following year.
Therefore, this time too, a big market is expected to occur by 2025.
In Europe and Asia, major financial institutions are starting cryptocurrency-related businesses due to the improvement of the regulatory environment, and more money from the financial market will flow into the cryptocurrency market than ever before. In the financial market as a whole, the shift to global monetary easing will be recognized in the second half of the year, and it is expected that risk assets will be more likely to be purchased.
This time, we will introduce Solana (SOL), a blockchain project that made great strides in 2023. Solana is a blockchain that began operation in 2020 as the leading Ethereum killer.
It has transaction processing performance far exceeding Ethereum, and in theory it is said to be able to process tens of thousands of transactions per second. In observed values, Ethereum processes around 30 transactions per second, while Solana stably processes about 3,000 transactions per second.
These scalable characteristics have attracted a lot of attention, and it is ranked 4th in CoinMarketCap's market capitalization ranking (as of the end of December 2023).
Now Solana has made a comeback as a decentralized application platform second only to Ethereum, but in 2022 the entire ecosystem was hit hard by the collapse of the FTX Group, with which it was closely involved. This has caused it to experience a crash of more than 95% from its all-time high recorded in November 2021.
However, the development community continued to expand, centered around the founders, and the price of SOL soared toward the second half of 2023 as new services such as decentralized exchanges and liquidity staking gained popularity.
At the annual event, SOL announced partnerships with Amazon and Google and plans for major client updates, and is developing into a more high-performance, easy-to-develop blockchain. SOL outperformed Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2023.
It will be interesting to see whether it can continue its momentum in 2024.
◉ Masamichi Matsushima
Monex Securities Monex University Crypto Asset Analyst
Graduated from the Faculty of Economics at Osaka University. After leaving a city bank, he was a founding member of a crypto asset-related startup and engaged in industry research and market analysis. Joined the Monex Group in 2018. At Monex Crypto Bank, he wrote industry research reports such as "Blockchain Trends in China (2020)" and "Blockchain Data Book 2020," and currently oversees the Web3 newsletter and research report "MCB RESEARCH." He also contributes to many domestic media outlets. He has been in his current position since March 2021.
Bitcoin moves with spot ETFs and halving in mind | Monex Securities, Matsushima Masamichi
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