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Bitcoin had a huge rally in 2023, with the digital currency up some 152% for the year.
And a number of commentators CNBC spoke to — both inside and outside of the cryptocurrency industry — expect the rise to continue.
After hitting a record high in 2021, bitcoin had a rough 2022, which was marked by the collapse of high-profile projects, liquidity issues and bankruptcies.
Also in 2023, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to criminal charges and stepped down as the company’s CEO as part of a $4.3 billion settlement with the Department of Justice.
Now that those two high-profile cases are out the way, many cryptocurrency executives see it as a chance to move forward and draw a line under the bad behavior of two of the industry’s poster children.
The halving, which happens every four years, is an event written in bitcoin’s code. The rewards so-called miners get for mining bitcoin is cut in half. This keeps a cap on supply of bitcoin, of which there will only ever be 21 million. In previous price cycles, halving preceded a rise in the price of bitcoin.
Meanwhile, there is growing excitement that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will approve the first ever bitcoin ETF, after years of opposition. This would mean investors can buy a product that tracks the price of bitcoin, without having to go on to an exchange and hold the digital currency directly. The industry is hoping this will draw in a wider range of investors, and in particular, large institutional investors.
With all of this excitement comes some quite bold predictions about bitcoin’s price. Here’s a selection of some of them.
Mark Mobius: $60,000
In 2022, Mark Mobius correctly forecast bitcoin would drop to $20,000 when it was trading above $28,000. He had a price call of $10,000 thereafter, which he stuck to in 2023. However, that did not materialize, as bitcoin rallied.
For 2024, Mobius told CNBC that bitcoin could reach $60,000 by the end of the year.
“No rationale for that prediction,” Mobius said, except that a bitcoin ETF looks likely and “that has heightened interest” in the cryptocurrency.
Bit Mining: $75,000
Youwei Yang, chief economist of crypto mining firm Bit Mining, believes that bitcoin could reach a high of $75,000 by 2024.
Yang attributes the anticipated price rise to a bitcoin ETF being approved, leading to higher institutional investment in bitcoin, as well as May 2024’s bitcoin halving, which would result in the bitcoin supply being constrained.
“I anticipate the Bitcoin will be trading around $25K to $75K in 2024, and $45K to $130K in 2025,” Yang said in an emailed note.
“While high prices are possible, not all investors will profit due to market volatility and the human tendencies of fear and greed.”
Bitcoin’s price performance over the last year.
Yang said the ETF approval remains the biggest story for bitcoin in 2024 — though investors should hold a degree of caution on timing given the wounds left by collapses of major crypto firms like Luna and FTX, and as it is an election year when the topic of crypto is likely to become more of a political issue.
“Timing the market is hard, but a gradual approach — accumulating in bear markets and taking profits in bull markets — might be a more effective strategy for whom don’t have early-on accumulations.”
CoinShares: $80,000
James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares, said the landscape for digital assets is set for “significant change” in 2024, driven by the potential approval of bitcoin ETFs in the U.S.
“This long-awaited development is poised to expand the investor base for cryptocurrencies and integrate them more closely with traditional financial markets,” Butterfill told CNBC via email.
“Estimations suggest that a 20% investment increase from current assets under management (around US$3 billion) could potentially propel Bitcoin prices to US$80,000.”
Meanwhile, the scenario of central banks cutting interest rates could also “play a decisive role” in moving bitcoin higher, Butterfill added.
The market will be also looking at factors beyond the halving — which he considers already priced into bitcoin — that could influence the price of the digital coin further.
“Thus, while the halving is a known event, other elements, particularly the potential for interest rate reductions, are likely to be significant in shaping Bitcoin’s price in the future,” Butterfill said.
Nexo: $100,000
Antoni Trenchev, a noted bitcoin bull and co-founder of Nexo, a cryptocurrency exchange, believes bitcoin could hit $100,000 in 2024.
In 2022, he called for bitcoin to hit $100,000, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the price of bitcoin collapsed that year. He held off from any further price predictions.
But in a note in December, Trenchev reinstated his $100,000 call for 2024, citing the halving and potential approval of multiple bitcoin ETFs.
“My expectation for 2024 is that the twin-turbo boost from the Bitcoin halving & spot ETF approval should propel Bitcoin to $100,000, with the prospect of further highs in 2025,” Trenchev said in a note. “The road to $100,000 will be lined with unexpected potholes and double-digit declines as Bitcoin.”
Trenchev added that the biggest gains will come from digital tokens and projects “that aren’t even on the radar yet.”
Standard Chartered: $100,000
In November, Standard Chartered doubled down on its $100,000 call for bitcoin made in April. The bank said this will be driven by the approval of numerous ETFs.
The halving will also be supportive for bitcoin, the bank said.
Carol Alexander: $100,000
In 2022, University of Sussex professor of finance Carol Alexander had a fairly successful run of calling bitcoin’s future price.
She predicted bitcoin would slip to $10,000 in 2022. That year, bitcoin fell as low as around $15,480, according to CoinDesk data. For 2023, Alexander said bitcoin would rally as high as $50,000. Bitcoin reached a yearly high of roughly $44,700 in early December.
Alexander told CNBC that during the first quarter of 2024, bitcoin will trade within the $40,000 to $55,000 range, owing to “professional traders creating volatility.”
Alexander said settlement of those charges is likely in either the second or third quarter, after which ETFs will be approved and bitcoin’s price will rise to $70,000, a new all-time high.
The price after that depends on the abilities of the ETF providers, such as Blackrock and Fidelity, “to equip their market makers not only to create the ETFs, but also to defend price manipulations” on exchanges which create “excessive volatility.”
“Before end of 2024 price could exceed $100k, but only if Blackrock and Fidelity market maker algorithms have the ability to reduce volatility,” Alexander concluded.
Matrixport: $125,000
Matrixport, which bills itself as a crypto financial services firm, released a note in November projecting that bitcoin would reach $63,140 by April 2024 and $125,000 by the end of next year.
“Based on our inflation model, the macro environment is expected to remain a robust tailwind for crypto. Another decline in inflation is anticipated, prompting the Federal Reserve to likely initiate interest rate cuts,” Matrixport said in its report.
“Combined with geopolitical crosscurrents, this healthy dose of monetary support should push Bitcoin to new highs in 2024.”
Many commentators see easing monetary policy as supportive for bitcoin, which is viewed as a risky asset. Meanwhile, some see bitcoin as a sort of “safe haven” asset to pour money into in times of geopolitical strife, though many disagree with this theory.
CoinFund: Up to $500,000
Venture capital CoinFund has one of the highest price calls for bitcoin for 2024.
“Bitcoin has a strong inverse correlation with the dollar and real yields, and both are now going down,” Seth Ginns, managing partner at CoinFund, told CNBC via email. “We also expect the follow through inflows post-launch of the BTC spot ETF, as well as growing excitement around the likely approval of ETH (ether) spot ETFs later in 2024, will be quite meaningful.”
Ginns added that he thinks the industry is in the process of “regulatory normalization.”
Ginns said that bitcoin could touch $1 million per coin “in this next cycle,” but said a more “reasonable expectation” for 2024 would see bitcoin between $250,000 and $500,000.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.