Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has announced that Bitcoin may soar to a new all-time high of $1 million, as the world’s largest cryptocurrency matures as an asset class and attracts new entrants.
“We have many more decades to build this industry,” Zhao said while speaking at an event in Lahore, Pakistan with Pakistan Crypto Council CEO Bilal bin Saqib. “We’ll definitely hit $1 million.”
“I don’t know if it’s next month, or this year, or next year, or however long — but eventually, we will,” Zhao added. “I think we’ve got enough momentum. This technology is just starting.”
To underscore his point, Zhao drew a parallel to the early days of other technological breakthroughs. He pointed to video-conferencing platforms and Amazon as examples of innovations requiring time — not just to develop the core product, but to build the necessary supporting infrastructure around them. “The payment infrastructure wasn’t there,” Zhao said about Amazon. “The delivery wasn’t there, so it took many years for Amazon to develop that. People underestimate.”
Zhao added that many people expect rapid transformation from new technologies, but that real change often unfolds over longer cycles. “People have kind of high expectations for everything to happen instantaneously,” he said. “But long-term, though, we’ve been around for like 15 years. For the first few years, nobody cared about [us].”
Earlier this February, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood forecast that Bitcoin would hit $1.5 million amid a surge in institutional adoption. “So many institutional investors are now looking at Bitcoin and thinking that they need to add it to their asset allocation, because its return profile looks so much different, and its risk profile looks so much different from all of the other assets in their portfolios,” Wood said.
Bitcoin is currently trading at a price near $83,656 after topping $109,000 this January.