A Bullish Bitcoin Price Prediction For 2025

With the year quickly coming to a close we thought we’d continue a fun tradition and look once again at the bullish Bitcoin price prediction for next year!

To Be Clear: This is just us coming together and discussing what factors look bullish for Bitcoin over the next twelve months. Nothing more. This is not financial advice and we do not know your personal financial situation. Anything you read below may not eventuate as described and you should do your own research as well as speak to a certified financial planner so they can give you proper financial guidance with all the information in front of them.

Most importantly this is not some recommendation to start day trading the Bitcoin market like a cocaine inhaling degenerate from the Wolf of Wall Street.

Bitcoin’s Price Right Now

As of right now, the second last week of 2024, the current price of Bitcoin is trading at around $100,000 USD. There’s of course the usual price fluctuations that are always present in the crypto world, but overall let’s just call it an even 100, it’s nice and round. This is also a new all time high for Bitcoin and a pretty historical price point to get past too.

Bitcoin’s Historical Price Performance

Bitcoin started the year at about $42,200 meaning it’s so far gone up around 137%. As noted above, this year also saw it smash through its previous all time high of around and then the special nice round number mark of $100k.

If we look over the past 10 years of Bitcoins price performance, 137% is the forth highest yearly return behind 2023 (155%), 2020 (298%) and 2017 (1,387%).

2024 Price Prediction Review

Now that we have an idea of where we are, let’s do a quick review of our 2024 Bitcoin Price Predictions.

2024 Bitcoin Halving

2024 will see yet another of these halvings, likely leading to increases in the bitcoin price as the new supply and demand balance sorts itself out. Do note however that according to historical data this price increase tends to happen over many, many months rather than at the actual time of the bitcoin halving.

Prediction: Price wouldn’t move at the time of the 2024 halving, only many months after it.

Review: The Bitcoin Halving occurred on 20th April 2024, taking the block reward down from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. The price on that day was around $65,000 and as predicted above, it didn’t really move much over the following months. By November 5th, around 7 months later, Bitcoin was still trading around this $68,000 mark meaning we were quite spot on for this one.

Bitcoin ETF Debut

The bitcoin halving alone is a huge positive outlook for the bitcoin price, but when combined with the fact that multiple Bitcoin ETFs look like they will be approved around January some time, we could potentially be seeing some new price highs.

With trillions of dollars under management between almost a dozen companies that are filing for a Bitcoin ETF it could put a lot of pressure on the buy side of things pushing the bitcoin price higher and higher.

Prediction: ETFs should be approved around January and then increase Bitcoins price.

Review: Next up was our prediction about the new Bitcoin ETFs. They did indeed get approved on the 11th January 2024 and have been, quite literally, the most successful ETF launch ever, in all of recorded history. Quite the debut!

As predicted, this has had a very clear impact on the price of Bitcoin. On the day of ETF approval the price was about $46,600. Over the course of the following two months it jumped up to $73,000 or a roughly 56% increase. Spot on again!

Flows in and out of the various ETFs, shown above, have been huge all year too. In fact, in early November the net assets of funds overtook the Gold ETF at around $33 billion USD. To say this was a successful launch is a huge understatement. Almost everyday now there are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin being bought, with some recent $1 billion days now being seen.

ETF Marketing Campaign

While most might think of the cringe worthy crypto ads played by FTX at the super bowl when we say marketing campaign, what we’re really referring to is the financial advisors and sales army. BlackRock and all the other financial institutions have hundreds of employees on tap that will be calling new and existing clients to sell them their shiny new Bitcoin ETF product.

…they will have to educate and explain Bitcoin to their investor clients in order to sell them on it meaning better understanding and faster adoption of the masses. Once approved, it’s likely the ETF campaign will be the biggest world wide bitcoin marketing push ever, all happening in 2024.

Prediction: That the ETFs will lead to a massive marketing campaign for Bitcoin.

Review: It’s difficult to say how much “marketing” the large ETF companies like BlackRock have been doing as it’s all done behind the scenes. Given the huge success of the ETFs though, that in itself is some of the biggest marketing you can get. Money talks as they say, and when it’s the best ETF launch in history that talks a lot!

Plummeting Supply On Exchanges

The supply of bitcoins on crypto exchanges is and has been plummeting for years now

Prediction: That the supply of Bitcoin on crypto exchanges would continue to decline.

Review: Last year we noted the long declining trend of bitcoins on exchanges going down. While you can’t really see any huge effect of the Halving around April this year, you can absolutely see a big impact the ETFs have had on the number.

As you can see clearly in the above image, the trend downwards is absolutely relentless starting at the exact time the ETFs were all approved (the white dot).

Over the course of this year half a million plus bitcoins have been drained. With only 2.5m bitcoin left, it will be interesting to see how things play out the closer it gets to zero over the next few years. And yes, we are aware that the “bitcoins on exchanges” metric isn’t the most accurate, but it does serve as a good rough guide to where things stand.

Bullish Signs For 2025

OK now let’s get to the fun part! What do we see as promising signs for Bitcoin in 2025?

Green, Green, Green, Red

An interesting cycle many have noticed regarding the returns of Bitcoin over the years is the green, green, green, red pattern. Essentially we see three “green” or positive yearly returns in a row followed by one “red” or negative yearly return. You can see this in the Bitcoin vs USD chart above.

This pattern has held true for many years now and if it continues to hold it means that 2025 should be a “green” or positive return year. It also means that 2026 would be a “red” or negative year overall for returns.

Given all the bullish signs we’ll further outline below, we feel there’s a very high chance 2025 is overall a “green” year returns wise. The more interesting thing to us at least is whether or not 2026 is green or red. If we end up seeing four positive return years in a row it’ll likely be a good indicator of a Bitcoin super cycle.

Increased Adoption

Increased wallets, increased transaction volume, increased mining Hash Rate (now over 700 ExaHash!), increased trading volume, increased number of Bitcoin Nodes all point to a healthy and growing ecosystem for Bitcoin. While this is more of a slow burn factor rather than a single day increase event, it helps form the underlying basis for everything else.

If there’s no actual users of Bitcoin, then everything else is basically moot. The more countries that adopt Bitcoin as legal currency, the more users that understand it and start storing their wealth in it, the more companies that use it as their reserve asset, the more miners and politicians and teachers there are the more room the current bitcoin price has to grow on a solid ground.

If the bitcoin price was surging while at the same time on chain metrics were clearly showing that no one was actually using it, it’d be more likely that there was a Bitcoin bubble being created or some illegal things happening behind the scene. True growth comes from increased adoption, demand and use of the Bitcoin network.

Increased Ecosystem

With increased demand and use also comes a broader, more mature ecosystem. This includes things like hardware Crypto Wallets, non-KYC Crypto Exchanges, bigger and more responsible financial institutions offering Bitcoin related services, more refined and solid regulations and accounting rules.

More user friendly and battle tested software wallets, more alignment by companies around the world on how standard things like sending and receiving bitcoin should be done. This common work flow then leads to more understanding by existing and newer users.

Think of the difference between the early Internet with Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Ask Jeeves and how that user experience compares to the sleek, smooth and much more unified work flows that have saturated everything from phones to laptops to fitness devices.

There are now devices for men, women, small wrists, big wrists, gamers, photographers, business workers and a thousand others.

Bitcoin serves just as diverse a range of people and one hardware wallet might not suit someone who’s vision is poor and thus needs a big screen. The more it expands, the more users can be on boarded and the more adoption in general grows leading to more demand and higher bitcoin prices.

In 2024 we’ve seen huge shifts in support for Bitcoin and crypto in general what with the ETF launches, banks now requesting the right to custody Bitcoin, pension funds around the world all starting to take small positions and even multiple politicians submitting Bitcoin Strategic Reserve proposals.

Bitcoin Strategic Reserves

We can’t talk about bullish signs without mentioning strategic reserves. Nation states are already stacking bitcoin, we know this and have unequivocal proof of it. There’s El Salvador who are the OGs in this area, but also others such as Bhutan who’s been mining and stacking bitcoin for years now too.

When it comes to a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve however, we’re talking about utterly huge countries like the USA passing legislation to formally acquire and hold bitcoin for the good of their people long term.

Similar in idea to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve would be a critical resource which is used by the USA for whatever they deem fit. This could be to calm financial markets in stress, pay off debts or funds common goods.

>> Learn More: Bitcoin Unit Of Account

A US Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis has already proposed this reserve and there’s some talk of the current incoming administration creating it too. If adopted it would obviously be an enormous boost to the price of Bitcoin for multiple reasons.

For starters, it would likely see the USA purchase a huge amount of bitcoin, pumping the price up due to the increased demand. Secondly it would likely encourage or even out right force other countries to do the same, again pumping the price as more and more buy in. Finally though it would also just add a huge amount of support and legitimacy to the idea of Bitcoin in general.

While the affect it would have on Bitcoin’s price is virtually assured, we don’t see any huge countries such as the USA approving a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve in 2025. While we believe it’d make for a fantastic idea, it’s not very likely to happen so soon.

That being said, the smartest move for any country that wants to acquire large amounts of bitcoin is to do it entirely in secret for as long as possible. This ensures that they get the lowest price per bitcoin and thus, the most amount of bitcoin for their currency. Countries could secretly print billions of their own fiat currency (for free essentially) and use it to buy bitcoin to hold long term just like they do with gold reserves.

Better Regulatory Environment

It’s no secret that for years most governments, the US in particular, have pushed back hard against Bitcoin. This is kind of to be expected given one of the main goals of Bitcoin is to make all countries central banks entirely obsolete!

However with the election in the US just recently there has been a huge shift of people in power. While we’re not going to go into what all their other stances are (good or bad), there were hundreds of Congress candidates that were openly for Bitcoin or “crypto” that got voted in. This means the regulatory environment for Bitcoin is now much, much more open and inviting.

In the election, 247 pro-crypto candidates won seats in the House of Representatives, compared to 113 anti-crypto members according to data compiled by Stand With Crypto

Decrypt

While this is a bullish signal for Bitcoin and the broader industry, we don’t see this really impacting price in any specific way in 2025. It will more be a “slow burn” type thing that should help enable other factors over the next 4 years.

Increased Liquidity

Just recently on December 9th, Bitcoin for the first time crossed the $2T Market Cap mark. This was again another huge milestone for the cryptocurrency signalling to various markets that the asset class is not just growing, but now has even more liquidity.

$2T is still tiny compared to other more mature assets like bonds or gold which means its price will fluctuate more if and when large investors enter the market.

However with increased adoption this liquidity grows allowing for those with more and more capital under management to enter the market without adversely affecting the price too much. As bigger players enter the game price increases along with liquidity which again helps bitcoin’s growth.

Five years ago the market cap was barely $120 billion. This extra order of magnitude increases the adoption of bitcoin for the financial world leading to more demand, more liquidity and higher prices.

Speculation And Hype

Finally we can’t not mention FOMO. Hype, speculation, NgU technology, a surging “extreme” greed index and market cap, memes, it all feeds into a very powerful factor that can sky rocket bitcoins price to extreme highs as well as gut wrenching lows.

Speculation and hype then also attracts day traders that are looking to make a quick buck which further distorts the price and volatility of Bitcoin. You get price swings with financial markets going crazy due to all the hype and the high volatility turns into extreme volatility.

The entire crypto world jumps on the band wagon with market sentiment usually going into the stratosphere until something breaks and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

While there has certainly been much hype and speculation already in 2024 with the huge price increases, based on previous cycles we expect to see it reach a fever pitch in 2025 and then potentially crash somewhat either towards the end of 2025 or early 2026.

You can see this trend in the 2016 Bitcoin Halving where you have a good price increase the following year then an even bigger increase the year after. That being said, with all the new institutional buyers, ETFs, governments and pension funds now in play, the days of the post hype crash may be either muted or entirely over. After all, it’s hard to have a market crash when $1B per day is being bought!

Bearish Signs For 2025

While we don’t want to be entirely one sided here, there’s really not a great deal we can think of or find that spells trouble for Bitcoin. While a bear market is never out of the question, the vast majority of things all seem to be quite positive for the Bitcoin BTC price.

The $100k Shuffle

While crossing the $100,000 USD barrier is a huge milestone for Bitcoins price it has been suggested that this may in fact bring either significant volatility or even a big price correction.

The theory behind this is that human psychology loves specific, especially round, numbers like $1,000, $100,000, $1m etc. As a result they will often mark these points as profit taking or re-balancing times, meaning that once an asset hits these very commonly held numbers there’s a combined sell off, resulting in downward pressure.

Of course the counter argument to this is that usually when assets reach major round number milestones like $100k they get a huge amount of press coverage (ie. marketing). This can result in more people becoming aware of it and investing in it, either balancing out the sell pressure or even overwhelming it entirely.

We feel it’s likely both of these sides play out, but at random and continuous times. We’re not going to specify whether this means price will go up, sideways or down though as to be completely honest, we don’t know. No one does. It does seem likely that volatility will increase a bit though while we’re around this $100k mark.

Is Bitcoin A Safe Long Term Investment Decision?

Bitcoin is generally considered by the global investment community as being one of the more risky asset classes. This is mostly due to the volatility in its price, rather than its actual technology. We should also note that we are only talking about Bitcoin here, not any other digital currency.

How safe of an investment Bitcoin is can also change a lot depending on what risk factor you’re referring to. For example, while Bitcoins price is very volatile, it allows you to have far greater property rights than any other asset, meaning it’s extremely safe when it comes to seizure or confiscation risks. It’s also immune to the printing of money we see in most countries around the world.

Furthermore the core technology of Bitcoin is built on the SHA-256 cryptographic algorithm which is what safeguards much of the Internet, including existing financial institutions. As such, the Bitcoin Network is for all intents and purposes impossible to crack and very safe to use.

>> Learn More: Is Bitcoin Real? And Is It Safe?

While we’re very bullish on Bitcoin, we also don’t hide its risks. Investors should be fully aware of the following risks that are involved when buying Bitcoin as an investment:

• Volatility: Bitcoin’s still a highly volatile asset that changes price every second, every day
• Exchange Fraud / Bankruptcy: Many users still allow third parties to custody their funds for them which becomes a problem when they go bankrupt or collapse. To avoid this risk, it’s recommended to never keep your bitcoins on an exchange and take full self custody
• Hacking: While this is a risk with virtually all assets in today’s modern world, Bitcoin is often stored by the user and not a financial institution and as such, may not be secured as well if the user isn’t very technical. This can lead to users losing their bitcoins to any number of hacking tricks that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Using a dedicated Hardware Crypto Wallet can significantly reduce this risk.
• Scams: There are a number of Bitcoin Scams that you should be aware of
• No Insurance: Deposits in banks are usually insured by the government in case the bank goes bankrupt, Bitcoin has no backup or insurance policy similar to stocks, real estate or bonds
• Regulation: As Bitcoin is still very new, regulations are still evolving as time goes on. As Bitcoin grows and draws more attention upon itself, regulation is expect to increase
• Protocol Risk: Although the Bitcoin network, protocol and cryptography that secures it have been battle tested for 15+ years, it’s still possible that someone may find a design flaw

Helping people understand Bitcoin in simple terms is what we specialize in here at Athena Alpha, so we have plenty of excellent resources available for free. Two main ones are our Beginners and Bitcoin 101 categories or you can start with our Understanding Bitcoin piece. Other great beginner pieces include:

• A Beginners Guide To Bitcoin Security
• A Beginners Guide To Bitcoin Privacy
• 10 Awesome Bitcoin Tips For Beginners
• What Is A Bitcoin Worth? The Perfect Money
• How To Invest In Bitcoins: A Beginners Guide To Keep You Safe
• Dollar Cost Averaging Crypto
• What Is Exit Liquidity & Why Learning About It Will Save You Thousands
• Why Does Your Bitcoin Address Change

Bitcoin Price Prediction

Now that Bitcoin has well and truly passed the $0.1M per bitcoin mark the Overton window has officially shifted. Some charts are now showing bitcoins price in million dollar units. Jumps seem to be firmly in the $1k+ increments now even before the years end. Nation states are already stacking with other even bigger ones formally discussing official strategic reserves.

The ETFs have been the most successful in history while MicroStrategy is tearing up the charts, entering the QQQ and sending out huge signals to every other company in the world to get on a Bitcoin Standard as fast as possible. CEO’s of world famous financial institutions are going on TV near weekly pumping out enormous price targets like $0.2M, $0.5M or even $0.8M per bitcoin for this upcoming 2025.

We obviously don’t participate in giving precise price predictions as it’s a fools errand. But we feel quite confident to state that 2025 should be a net positive or “bull” year. A few key things to watch will be how much bitcoin MicroStrategy buys, how much bitcoin the ETFs buy and whether or not the USA (or any other major country) implements a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve.

All the while we simply sit back and enjoy the memes!