Billionaire trader and longtime cryptocurrency bull Mike Novogratz has predicted that the total crypto market cap will reach $2 trillion by the end of 2018.

Mike Novogratz: Crypto Market Cap to Hit $2 Trillion in 2018

The Galaxy Investment Partners founder made this prediction on the Monday episode of CNBC’s Fast Money, explaining that while he would not be surprised to see a short-term pullback after this quarter’s incredible rally, he believes the market’s long-term fundamentals are sound and deserve a bullish posture.

“I have a sense that this is going to go a lot further. When I try to think of valuation, bitcoin really has taken the use case of digital gold,” he said, estimating that bitcoin would need to increase another 30 to 50 times to reach parity with gold capitalization.”

Several weeks ago, Novogratz had predicted that the bitcoin price would reach $10,000 before the end of the year. Although it had yet to reach that mark by the time of writing, the bitcoin price appears positioned to punch through that barrier at any moment. In fact, it has already done so on South Korean exchanges, which tend to trade at a $100 to $200 premium over the global average price.

Although many mainstream analysts continue to deride bitcoin as a bubble, Novogratz — who now says that as much as 30% of his net worth is invested in crypto assets — believes that the markets are still far too small to be considered a repeat of the dotcom bubble that occurred at the turn of the millennium.

“The whole market cap of all [cryptocurrencies] is $300 billion. That’s nothing. The NASDAQ at its high, in the 1999 bubble, was $6 trillion, and the NASDAQ was a U.S.-led bubble,” he said. Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is “a global phenomenon,” with the majority of trading volumes concentrated outside of the U.S.

‘This Thing’s Going to Go a Lot Higher’

So although he would not be surprised to see a short-term “backfill,” he believes that, barring an “about-face” from regulators or a major exchange hack, the markets will recover and continue to climb rapidly throughout the coming year.

“Over the medium term, this thing’s going to go a lot higher,” he said, reflecting that his recent mid-term target of $1 trillion was on the conservative end. He now believes that the crypto market cap will reach as high as $2 trillion by the end of 2018 representing a sixfold to sevenfold increase over its current level.

And if investors are able to resist the urge to take profits, he says the long-term prospects are even more attractive, both for bitcoin in particular and crypto assets in general.

“If gold’s $8 trillion, I’m wondering why bitcoin can’t get there,” he concluded.

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