Bitcoin can reach $400K in 2021 as 'risk-off reserve asset' — Bloomberg

Bitcoin (BTC) still gets criticized for being too volatile, but one Bloomberg analyst believes that it conversely is becoming a "risk-off" choice for investors.

In a tweet on March 25, Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, said that this year marked a watershed moment for the largest cryptocurrency.

$400,000 BTC would "rhyme" with history

McGlone uploaded a chart of the BTC/USD average price and the Bitcoin Liquid Index, a price ticker specially created for institutional use.

"Well on its way to becoming a global digital reserve asset, a maturation leap in 2021 may be transitioning Bitcoin toward a risk-off asset, in our view," he wrote.

A potential price peak this year, with previous behavior as context, could be as much as $400,000 per coin, the chart shows. This dwarfs other estimates, such as that of stock-to-flow, which calls for an average of $288,000 between now and 2024.

While McGlone did not provide exact details of the factors behind Bloomberg's view, the idea of Bitcoin reducing, rather than increasing portfolio risk is the talking point of the year among corporates. New reports of treasury allocations to BTC appear frequently, with appetite unfazed by price action.

"My mission right now is to fix the balance sheets of the world," Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, one of the largest Bitcoin treasury investors, said in an interview with TIME this week.

Saylor kickstarted a trend among public companies last summer, which has seen over $52 billion converted to BTC on a cost basis, now worth over $73 billion, according to monitoring resource Bitcoin Treasuries.

What risk?

Ahead of Morgan Stanley becoming the first major bank to open up access to Bitcoin funds for high net worth investors next week, however, naysayers continue to peddle familiar arguments against exposure.

"Morgan Stanley limiting crypto access to 2.5% of high net worth individual accounts, that have over $2 million in assets and have been active for over six months, shows that the bank realizes Bitcoin is very risky and wants to limit legal liability from investors who lose money," gold bug Peter Schiff recently claimed.

Meanwhile, Fed Chair Jerome Powell likened Bitcoin to a "substitute" for gold, to Schiff's displeasure, but added that it did not pose a risk to the dollar or to financial stability.

As Cointelegraph reported, average returns for BTC/USD have topped 200% every year since the cryptocurrency's inception.