Crypto Analyst Tommy Lee Changes His 2022 Bitcoin Prediction – This is What He Thinks Now

Top Wall Street strategist Thomas Lee, who is also co-founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors, believes crypto will reemerge despite a lackluster performance in 2022. 

Lee, who appeared in a recent interview with CNBC, said the current crypto bear market is nothing new. He noted that the crypto industry experienced a similar meltdown back in 2018 when Bitcoin lost more than 70% of its value from all-time highs. 

Why @fundstrat says "this is an important moment for the [crypto] industry" pic.twitter.com/wcBLCoxtyU

— CNBCOvertime (@CNBCOvertime) November 25, 2022

“It has been a horrific year for crypto. Nobody has made money in crypto in 2022,” he said. “But it is not that different from 2018. If we look back at that crypto winter when Bitcoin went from $17,000 to something around $1,200, that was the time when some of the best projects were created.”

Lee added that the current market downturn is “an important moment” for the industry since it is cleansing a lot of bad players. He also stressed that he doesn’t think that crypto is dead. Instead, he is convinced that crypto will have staying power because of what it offers. 

When asked if he still recommends buying Bitcoin, Lee said yes. “We first wrote about Bitcoin in 2017, and we recommended people put 1% of their funds into Bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin was under $1,000. That holding today would be 40% of their portfolio without rebalance.”

Lee Remains Bullish on Bitcoin

When Lee’s Fundstrat published its first report on Bitcoin back in 2017, the company predicted the flagship cryptocurrency could be worth between $15,000 and $50,000 by 2022. 

That prediction has been largely true, with Bitcoin trading near the $50,000 mark at the beginning of the year and dropping to around $16,000 over the past couple of days amid the collapse of FTX, once the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. 

Back in February, Lee shared an even more bullish prediction about Bitcoin, saying that the leading cryptocurrency could surge to $200K in the following years. 

At the time, he argued that the interest rates will cause bond owners to lose money in the future. As such, many American investors will allocate their capital to alternative assets such as cryptocurrencies, and that could fuel bitcoin’s price to $200,000.

“The biggest downside for crypto would be a vulnerability exposed in bitcoin, because it’s the most important blockchain and the one with the most value stored on it,” he said.