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BKCM Funds CEO Brian Kelly said the “big problem” with using bitcoin as a currency is its volatility. The cryptocurrency expert told CNBC: “This week we had big volume in futures. That’ll hopefully tamp down the volatility a bit. It doesn’t mean it can’t reach those levels. “It just might not do it as fast as it did in the last two years. It might take four years like Tim Draper said.” Mr Kelly added: “If we can get transaction volumes up again, then there’s no reason why this couldn’t be at 20 to 25,000 by the end of the year again – we could make a new high.”

Getty•CNBC Bitcoin price: Brian Kelly said bitcoin could reach a "new high" by end of 2018

Bitcoin price surged at the start of April, rocketing by 16 percent in just one week and bringing its value above $8,000. In relation to the surge in value, Mr Kelly said: “This week was huge. You want to look at transaction volumes. It is starting to pick up with trying to make a bottom. “This week could’ve been just speculative. We have tax selling rolling off. We have some short covering going on. “So we need the fundamentals, which is just the number of transactions to catch up to this a bit and if we see that then I do think that we bottom here and we’ve got a sustainable bull run ahead of us.”

Cryptocurrency price: A year in charts Mon, March 12, 2018 Compare crypto currencies (Ripple, Bitcoin, Ethereum, LiteCoin) on value, market cap and supply for the past year Play slideshow coindesk.com 1 of 10 LiteCoin is going down with the market dip