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In a live interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday, Peter Chung, Head of Research at quantitative trading firm Presto, reaffirmed his conviction that Bitcoin can reach $210,000 before the end of 2025, arguing that the asset is evolving into a macro-level refuge during moments of stress in the global financial system.
Bitcoin Set To Go Parabolic
“We have not changed our market outlook,” he began in the opening seconds of the interview. “Bitcoin target price remains $210,000, driven by institutional adoption and the global liquidity expansion.” He emphasized that the same framework underpins Presto’s valuation of Ether, adding: “For ETH our target price was based on the ETH-to-BTC ratio, which was 0.05. We still maintain that as well, reflecting the community’s efforts to address the value-leakage problem.”
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Chung pushed back on suggestions that the pullback earlier this year invalidates the model: “Granted, not everything turned out the way we expected so far this year—especially the macro outlook and the market reaction to it—but in hindsight it was actually a healthy correction that has paved the way for the further re-rating of Bitcoin as a mainstream asset.”
Within Presto, he said, the dominant task this month has been “trying to figure out whether anything is broken in the market—be it confidence or some kind of global order—and how these assets are positioned in people’s portfolios.” Their conclusion: nothing systemic has fractured, leaving the secular drivers intact.
The longest exchange came when the anchors asked why gold surged in April while Bitcoin initially lagged. Chung offered a granular taxonomy of Bitcoin’s behavior: “Bitcoin has two faces: digital gold and a risk-on asset. Most of the time Bitcoin behaves like a risk-on asset […]. But it’s during a crisis that Bitcoin behaves like gold […]. These moments are rare. They happen only when the market has doubts about the stability of the US-dollar-dominated financial system […] and that’s what we saw in the month of April.”
Asked to identify the most statistically significant input behind the $210,000 figure, Chung pointed to what he called “global liquidity expansion,” a variable that Presto tracks through the balance-sheet trajectories of major central banks and large sovereign wealth funds. Although money-supply growth has slowed in the United States, it has re-accelerated in China and, more recently, in the euro area—a pattern that Presto believes will leak into crypto markets through cross-border flows.
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He also underlined the role of institutional order-flow data, which the firm credits for spotting the 2024 rally. “The proportion of block trades above $10 million in Bitcoin perpetual futures,” he noted off-camera, “is back above 7 percent of total volume for the first time since November 2023.”
Why $210,000 Is Not ‘Optimistic’
Although the round number draws headlines, Chung argued that $210,000 is conservative relative to historical adoption curves: “If you map Bitcoin’s network-effect data onto the monetisation path of the internet between 1994 and 2007, you arrive at levels far above $210,000. We chose that figure precisely because it balances tail-risk and liquidity constraints. It is not a moon-shot; it is the median outcome in our distribution.”
Still, he conceded that the path is unlikely to be linear: “Our mission is not to be prophets of the exact week or month; our mission is to determine whether anything in the structural thesis—scarcity, decentralisation, adoption—has broken. So far, nothing is broken.”
The anchors pressed him on what would force a downward revision. Chung named two red lines: A lasting collapse in real global M2, which would strangle risk capital and suppress the liquidity premium that pushes scarce digital assets higher, and a fatal consensus bug or governance failure inside the Bitcoin network—an event he stressed has “never happened in fifteen years” but that any quantitative risk model must include.
Short of those, Presto sees the April correction as a “mid-cycle purge” that flushed overheated leverage ahead of the next leg. “Bitcoin is already trying to catch up,” Chung said, pointing to the rally off the mid-April lows. Whether that momentum propels the asset all the way to six-figure territory by New Year’s Eve will, in his words, “depend on whether investors choose to price geopolitical insurance now or after the next tremor.”
At press time, BTC traded at $94,983.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com