The billionaire Michael Novogratz, a hedge fund manager who has set up a 500-million-dollar fund to invest in crypto-currency, predicts that the serious rally of the Bitcoin price will continue. After rising more than seven times since December, the largest and most popular digital currency will be over 10,000 USD this year, compared to the current price of 8,400 USD.

The smaller rival of the Bitcoin – Ether – will be traded at 500 USD, compared to nearly 370 USD now.

“The Bitcoin is like digital gold – gold has value only because people say it has value”, said Michael Novogratz. According to him, the revolution in crypto-currencies is due to the collapse of confidence after the 2008 crisis.

The Bitcoin went up to a record 8,374 USD today after Novogratz’s comments.

Many of his former Wall Street colleagues are far from sharing his enthusiasm. The head of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Jamie Dimon called everyone who buys a fool and predicts that they “will pay the price”.

For his part, Neil Dwane, Chief Investment Officer of Allianz Global Investors, has identified crypto-currency trade as “fraud for criminals around the world”. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock Inc, determined the Bitcoin as an index to measure money-laundering worldwide.

The 52-year-old Michael Novogratz hastened to respond by pointing out that “these guys are all over 60”. “There is some truth in that it’s hard for someone who has not grown up in the digital world to know we live in digital world”.

Institutional investors are beginning to sink into the world of crypto-currency, and companies are trying to build a market infrastructure to trade more smoothly – from a regulated exchange to indexes and derivatives. Other analysts on the crypto-currency market also revised upwards their forecasts for the digital currency. Standpoint Research on Monday raised the estimated price to 14,000 USD from the previous forecast of 11,000 USD in 2018. Seabreeze Partners also raised its forecast for 2018 to a further 27,000 USD.