Dan Morehead, the CEO of Pantera Capital, noted that the bitcoin market is already outperforming other assets since the Fed launched an unlimited bond-buying program in March 2020.
With ECB following a similar quantitative easing policy, it could prove further bullish for the benchmark cryptocurrency.
As Bloomberg predicts Bitcoin to hit $20,000 in 2020, the catalysts that could make it happen are already maturing.
The European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday announced that it would boost its bond-buying stimulus program until June 2021. President Christine Lagarde said during a press brief that the ECB would buy another €600 billion of bonds to aid the European economy.
The unprecedented quantitative easing program expects to add a record €1.35 trillion ($1.53 trillion) worth of burden on the ECB’s balance sheet. The move would increase the bank’s asset portfolio to €4 trillion ($4.53 trillion), which, at present, amounts to a third of eurozone’s gross domestic product.
Meanwhile, macro analysts predicted that ECB could extend its stimulus program beyond June 2021.
“With inflation forecast clearly below 2% in 2022, more monetary stimulus further down the road should not be excluded,” Carsten Brzeski, the chief economist at ING Germany, told CNBC.
Marco Valli, the head of macro research at UniCredit, also reiterated the same outcome, stating that ECB’s emergency purchases have no end in sight.
Bitcoin Meets QE is Bullish
As ECB perpetually boosts the supply of euros across the eurozone, assets such as bitcoin and gold should go a lot of higher.
Ultimately, the trillions of euros created by the ECB will go through the real economy, which will likely cause inflation, loss of purchasing power, and even a plunge in confidence. Unlimited QE’s do not go unnoticed – as it pushes investors into higher-yielding assets such as stocks or bitcoin.
The Fed’s bond-purchasing program has brought out a similar outcome. As the U.S. central bank announced that it would inject $3 trillion into the banking system, riskier assets, including bitcoin, stocks, and Gold, rose in sync. Nevertheless, bitcoin outranked them by returning the best year-to-date yields.
Bitcoin YTD performance against macro assets | Source: Pantera Capital
“Repeated and unlimited use of fiscal and monetary expansion will push up the quantity of paper money required to buy things that have fixed quantities like bitcoin – this includes stocks. The policy is already achieving its goal,” said Dan Morehead, the CEO of Pantera Capital, a crypto-focused investment firm.
The $20K Bitcoin Price Target
In its latest research paper, Bloomberg predicted that bitcoin could double its value to $20,000 by the end of 2020. The media mogul cited the cryptocurrency’s halving, which reduced bitcoin’s daily supply from $1,800 BTC to 900 BTC, as well as central bank easing as the main catalysts behind the potential price rally.
BTCUSD uptrend locked under $10,000-level | Source: TradingView.com, Coinbase
“This unprecedented year of central-bank easing is accelerating the maturation of the first-born crypto toward a digital version of gold while accentuating oversupply constraints in most of the market,” wrote Bloomberg.