Although the recent rise in the price of Bitcoin did not come as a surprise to the CEO of BTCC, he believes the price of the digital currency can reach up to $7,000 if it scales over its previous all-time high.

In an interview with CNBC, Bobby Lee says that people have been waiting for a time like this for quite a while. Bitcoin’s price has been increasing steadily over the past eight years, including the few short six years in which the currency increased in value by more than a thousand times.  

It looks promising

Lee added in the video that although he doesn’t know how high it would go in 2017, as he wouldn’t like to make predictions in the short-term, the long-term outlook seems promising.

He says:

“I think long-term, we all understand that Bitcoin is very unique. It’s the world’s first digital asset and in that sense, today’s value is only around $16 bln. Compared to other assets, especially things like gold, stocks and real assets, $16 bln is just a drop in the bucket. So if it goes to $32 bln, that would be doubling the price. In the past few years, what we’ve seen is: whenever we hit an all-time high, Bitcoin itself would actually exceed its all-time high and go up by 3 to 5x or even more. So if it crosses the $1,300 sort of all-time high, it might even go up to $7,000 per Bitcoin.”

Major drivers of Bitcoin price

Lee’s BTCC is one of the leading Chinese exchanges - the largest Bitcoin trading platform on the market - to record a new all-time high price of CNY$7,666 or $1,103. He maintains that the drivers of Bitcoin price have not changed but have been the same for the past eight years of its existence.

He says:

“The reason that people are more paying attention to Bitcoin in the past year is because of the geopolitical stuff happening around the world. We have the demonetization effort in India and Venezuela; we have the foreign capital control in China; we have the excessive money printing in other countries, especially in the US, Japan and so on and the high debts. So when the existing money system has problems, people maybe turn to Bitcoin.”