Bitcoin market cap could reach $200 trillion by 2032 – here’s why
The market value of Bitcoin (BTC) could reach as much as $200 trillion in the next nine years, if legendary bitcoiner Adam Back is to be believed.
“Early this year I was curious about the ‘bitcoin 2x per year on average’ claim,” the Bitcoin early adopter and founder of Bitcoin development firm Blockstream wrote in a Twitter thread posted this weekend.
He went on to say that the claim “verifies” and that BTC has actually risen by 2.036 times per year on average between January 2013 and December 2022.
If the trend continues, the price of each bitcoin will reach $10 million by the end of the next two halvings, while the asset’s total market value will reach a massive $200 trillion, Back wrote.
Bitcoin halving occurs approximately every four years, and the reward paid to miners is halved. The halvings have historically been catalysts for major bull markets in the coin, which in turn has led to bull runs across the broader digital asset market.
Bitcoin’s current market cap was $417.2 billion — or $0.4 trillion — at the time of writing. In other words, the upside potential is still massive if the legendary Bitcoin developer is right in his prediction.
Hal Finney’s original prediction
In his Twitter thread, Adam Back also noted that the $200 trillion market cap is the same as Bitcoin early adopter Hal Finney predicted back in 2009.
According to Finney, such a market cap could be reached if Bitcoin “becomes the dominant payment system in use worldwide.”
“Then the total value of the currency should equal the total value of all the wealth in the world,” Finney, who passed away in 2014, wrote at the time.
Back added that he does not believe that the use of Bitcoin will decrease over time, nor that the volatility will be lower going forward. He even said that adoption could lead to “hyperbitcoinization spurts,” where “rapid viral adoption nukes a weak currency into a hyperinflationary frenzy.”
“People become pragmatic, adapt quickly if they see fiat melting, a rush of others protecting savings via bitcoin,” the Blockstream founder predicted, while also saying that ordinary Bitcoin users “will not have much incentive to sell in size .”
As a result, less and less BTC will be available on the open market for newcomers to buy, and the only way these late adopters can buy bitcoin will be to “pry it out” of existing users’ cold wallets, Back wrote.
