Bitcoin to Surpass USD 20K, But Brace for a Surprise – BitPay CCO

As every year, be prepared that something unforeseen could happen in 2020 also, fueling another bitcoin (BTC) rally, Sonny Singh, chief commercial officer of major crypto payment processor BitPay, reminded. In either case, he estimates that BTC will rise above USD 20,000 this year.

“A lot of people think it’s going to be because of the halving […], but I think that’s already factored in a lot. Bitcoin, again, goes up high when unforeseen things happen. Last year, the catalyst behind that was Libra happening with Facebook,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

According to Singh, China, Russia, India could legalize Bitcoin, or some new, Facebook-level companies will enter the crypto industry, or the American government could do something unforeseen that could push bitcoin price “fast and far.”

Going into further detail on these “unforeseen incidents,” Singh also used the Iranian situation as an example, saying that the incident did fuel a market rally.

“Any time you have an unforeseen circumstance, like the Iran incident that happened a couple of days ago, that adds some new buyers to the market […] and that really drives [the market] to be up 20% in two days,” Singh said.

In the interview, Singh further argued that the narrative of bitcoin as a safe haven is nothing new. It first happened during the “Greece incident” several years ago, he said, referring to the capital controls imposed by the Greek government in 2015 to prevent a banking collapse in the country. However, he also pointed out that events like these is something that happens “every couple of years,” and that we will, therefore, see something similar again.

“I don’t think a lot of people went and sold their GE stocks and went and bought bitcoin, but what we see happen is that just a little bit of people start to buy bitcoin, […] and that really bumps it up and makes it go a lot higher, a lot faster,” Singh explained.