Anthony Pompliano, who works in Morgan Creek’s Digital Assets division, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday that he believes the Bitcoin price is essentially going to bottom out with an 85% reduction in value from its previous all-time high. Prefacing that his forecast is based on previous experience in the crypto markets, he said:

“85% from the all-time high is about where we’ll end up. Puts it around $3,000. Came close over the weekend but probably a little bit more to fall.”

He went on to explain to the host, who spoke of lost confidence among Bitcoin investors and the prospect of them returning to the market following their recent heavy losses, that he feels Bitcoin was overvalued and is now seeing a healthy correction.

“Bitcoin was overvalued in December ‘17. There’s more sellers than buyers this year. So the price goes down. But there’s three things you gotta remember. The first is, this is a transaction settlement layer. It’s the most secure in the world. It’s got to be worth something. It can’t be worth zero.”

“The second is it’s the best performing asset class in the last ten years. It’s outperformed S&P, Dow, Nasdaq, et cetera, during the longest bull run. And so it experienced two 80% drops during that time, but the asset’s still up over 400% in the last two years,” he continued. “And the third thing is: that was all done by retail.”

‘Tulip Mania’ Invoked

Another commentator on the show asked why the Bitcoin bubble would have a different outcome than “Tulip Mania,” referring to the 400-year-old story of tulips becoming extremely lucrative in Holland and then going out of fashion, crashing the bulb price. Tulips were one of the earliest futures markets, as a result. Bitcoin, in reality, has a lot more money than the tulip bubble ever could have generated — even a crashed market would likely outsize the estimated size of the tulip market at that time.

To this, Pompliano said:

“I think what’s important to remember is that through 2017, all of the buyers were retail, right? And so now what you’re seeing in 2018 as the price has gone down, you’re starting to see institutions come in. And one of the things that doesn’t get talked about much is that most of these institutions are not buying on exchanges. They’re actually buying on the OTC market, which we don’t have great transparency into or insight. So what I think you’re seeing is the washout of these retail investors […]”

He was then cut off by a question about mining, which he answered deftly. He then said his firm had been pressing into Bitcoin the whole way down and that they will continue to acquire discounted Bitcoin, based on “very deep conviction” at Morgan Creek.

Morgan Creek owns a partnership called the Digital Asset Index Fund with Bitwise Asset Management, which enables large institutional clients to get convenient exposure to digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the myriad of tokenized assets therein.

Featured Image from Shutterstock. Charts from TradingView.