Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has been stealthily rising in 2023.
Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Bitcoin’s value could jump to as much as $100,000 by the end of 2024, Standard Chartered said in a note published Monday.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other mid-tier U.S. lenders has solidified the case for bitcoin as a “decentralised, trustless and scarce digital asset,” Standard Chartered analyst Geoff Kendrick said in the note.
related investing news
5 hours ago
“We see potential for Bitcoin (BTC) to reach the USD 100,000 level by end-2024, as we believe the much-touted ‘crypto winter’ is finally over,” Kendrick said in the report, titled “Bitcoin — Pathway to the USD 100,000 level.”
“The current stress in the traditional banking sector is highly conducive to BTC outperformance – and validates the original premise for Bitcoin as a decentralised, trustless and scarce digital asset,” Kendrick added.
“Given these advantages, we think BTC’s share of total digital assets market cap could move into the 50-60% range in the next few months (from around 45% currently).”
Bitcoin was trading at $27,601.55 as of 9:40 a.m. ET, according to CoinGecko data.
The woes of Circle’s USD Coin and other so-called stablecoins, which aim to achieve a 1-to-1 peg to the U.S. dollar, has also benefited bitcoin, Kendrick said.
USDC lost its peg to the dollar after its issuer Circle revealed exposure to SVB. The coin has since regained its $1 value, however its total market value has fallen to $30.7 billion from more than $43 billion since Mar. 10 when the bank was placed into receivership by the U.S. government, according to CoinGecko data.
This, coupled with a stabilization of risk assets and speculation that the Federal Reserve will ease monetary tightening further, means the “pathway to the USD 100,000 level is becoming clearer,” Kendrick said.
Proponents of bitcoin maintain the digital currency is an asset worth diversifying into in times of economic distress. As the theory goes, bitcoin has a limited supply of 21 million bitcoins, meaning it should appreciate as demand for alternative assets grows to avoid the effects of high inflation.
The cryptocurrency failed that test last year when it plunged 65%, marking the second-worse year for bitcoin of all time amid a tumultuous backdrop of multibillion-dollar flameouts such as FTX and Terra and regulatory clampdowns.
More recently, however, the token has been climbing, suggesting a recovery may be on the cards. Bitcoin is up 66% since the start of the year — though it has fallen sharply since breaching $30,000 two weeks ago.
“The associated price jump – from below USD 20,000 before the SVB issues to above USD 30,000 – has dramatically increased the profitability of Bitcoin mining companies,” Kendrick wrote.
Bitcoin miners are volunteers who allocate computing power toward solving complex cryptographic puzzles in order to verify transactions are genuine and mint new units of currency.
“With the price of BTC now well above our USD 15,000 estimate of direct costs, miners are unlikely to sell many coins,” Kendrick said, noting that this would be a positive development for the cryptocurrency as miners are a major driving force for the market given the size of their holdings.
“The broader macro backdrop for risky assets is also gradually improving as the FOMC nears the end of its tightening cycle. While BTC can trade well when risky assets suffer, correlations to the Nasdaq suggest that it should trade better if risky assets improve broadly.”
Bitcoin’s price outlook
Standard Chartered isn’t the only one predicting a strong rally of bitcoin’s price. Last month, at a blockchain conference in Paris, multiple crypto industry insiders forecast bitcoin hitting a new all-time high in 2023 — with an executive at U.S.-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange Gemini telling CNBC $100,000 could be a possibility.
Ironically, on the bearish end, Standard Chartered said that the cryptocurrency could tumble as low as $5,000 in a list of market surprise for 2023.
Some crypto investors are pointing to anticipation of the next so-called bitcoin “halving,” which reduces the rewards to bitcoin miners by 50%, as a potential catalyst for another monster rally in the coin’s price.
OpenAI’s short-form artificial intelligence video app Sora hit 1 million downloads less than five days after its launch in late September, according to an executive.
Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, shared the milestone in a post on X late Wednesday. He said Sora reached 1 million downloads even faster than ChatGPT, the company’s popular AI chatbot that supports 800 million weekly active users.
Sora allows users to generate short videos for free by typing in a prompt. The app is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means people need a code to access it. Despite these restrictions, Sora has climbed to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store.
“Team [is] working hard to keep up with surging growth,” Peebles wrote.
Sora’s launch has also sparked intense backlash, namely around whether the app infringes on copyrights. CNBC viewed videos on the platform that included characters from shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Rick and Morty” and “South Park,” and was able to generate many characters independently.
Read more CNBC tech news
The Motion Picture Association, which advocates on behalf of the television, motion picture and home video industries, said in a statement Monday that “videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service.”
“OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue,” Charles Rivkin, CEO of the MPA said in the statement. “Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will soon give rights holders more granular control over character generation, according to a blog post last week.
During a briefing with reporters at the company’s DevDay event on Monday, Altman said some users have complained that Sora is too restrictive. He asked for patience as the company irons out best practices.
“Please give us some grace,” Altman said. “The rate of change will be high.”
An Intel manufacturing technician holds an Intel Core Ultra series 3 processor (code-named Panther Lake) built on Intel 18A, inside Intel’s new Fab 52 in Chandler, Arizona, in September 2025.
Courtesy: Intel
Intel on Thursday announced its new PC chips slated to debut in laptops next year as the chipmaker battles to turn around its struggling business.
The company said the new Panther Lake processor is made with its 18A technology and is the most advanced node made on U.S. soil.
The new generation of chips will be made at Intel’s Fab 52 facility in Arizona, which the company said is now fully operational and set to ramp production.
“The United States has always been home to Intel’s most advanced R&D, product design and manufacturing – and we are proud to build on this legacy as we expand our domestic operations and bring new innovations to the market,” CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in a release announcing the news.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan holds a wafer of CPU tiles for the Intel Core Ultra series 3, code-named Panther Lake, outside the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, Arizona. Panther Lake is the first client system-on-chips (SoCs) built on the Intel 18A process node.
Courtesy: Intel
Intel’s latest reveal comes during a critical stretch for the beleaguered chipmaker that has lagged in recent years and struggled to keep up with cutting-edge chip demands spurred by the artificial intelligence revolution.
Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on April 8, 2025.
Candice Ward | Google Cloud | Getty Images
Google is taking another shot at selling businesses on artificial intelligence agents by introducing subscriptions featuring agents that perform specific work tasks.
Gemini Enterprise targets large organizations, starting at a monthly fee of $30 per person. Gemini Business, for smaller clients, costs $21 per person each month. The offerings enable corporate workers to build agents that draw on data from Box, Microsoft and Salesforce products.
Premade Google agents for software development, data science and customer engagement also come with the new Gemini subscriptions, along with access to agents from Workday and other companies. They include the capabilities of Agentspace, an agent building product Google announced in December. Google will upgrade current Agentspace clients to Gemini Enterprise or Gemini Business free of charge through the course of their contracts, a spokesperson said.
Gemini subscriptions come with Model Armor, a feature for inspecting and blocking requests and responses in AI chats, so organizations don’t need to fuss with setting it up.
The launch comes three days after OpenAI showed how people can access tools from third-party apps in ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, are looking to get enterprises hooked on agents that take care of some processes, so employees can do other things. Both companies sell services aimed at developers and at nontechnical workers. Neither Gemini Enterprise nor Gemini Business require coding.
Read more CNBC tech news
“We’ve seen people from consulting services companies, telecommunications companies, software companies, hospitality companies and a variety of different manufacturing companies all using these, and in a variety of scenarios,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud group, in a media briefing.
Kurian, who accelerated the unit’s year-over-year revenue growth back above 30% in the second quarter, named cruise line Virgin Voyages as a Gemini Enterprise early adopter.
Firms are more likely to be exploring or testing AI agents than putting them into production, said Chirag Dekate, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. But Google’s handling of security and governance should ease concerns among big companies evaluating agent systems, Dekate said.
Google’s new Gemini subscriptions depend on the company’s Gemini AI models for working with text, images and videos. Google and other model makers regularly release new versions, and enterprises want to avoid getting stuck with lagging models when selecting agent software, Dekate said.
“How Google is able to leverage this unified messaging in the Gemini 3.0 launch sequence, which is coming soon, I think, will also be a crucial litmus test,” he said. “In other words, will they be able to offer a same-day sort of innovation cycle, or is this going to be staggered in terms of adoption patterns?”