Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2021. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain-related fields tell Forkast.News their predictions for the year ahead.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao
Changpeng Zhao is co-founder and CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume.
In addition to its centralized cryptocurrency exchange and crypto wallet, Binance also operates the Binance Chain and Smart Chain blockchains, incubator, token launch platform, academy and charity foundation. In 2020, Binance acquired crypto data provider CoinMarketCap for an undisclosed amount.
Zhao — popularly known as “CZ” — started Binance in 2017. Prior to Binance, Zhao founded BijieTech, a Shanghai-based exchange systems provider. He was head of development at Blockchain.info as well as chief technology officer at OKCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange.
Predictions for 2021
- Institutional adoption and impact on cryptocurrency prices: “Institutional adoption is definitely going to increase in 2021, especially corporate treasury. Those guys have a lot of money and there’s probably like US$60 trillion in the U.S. market alone in terms of just equity markets. If we look at derivatives and other things, that’s even bigger. So I think that alone probably will push the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies up quite significantly.”
- Bitcoin price prediction: “Bitcoin is probably going to do another five to 10x this year alone. I will put it somewhere around like 150K to 400K-ish in terms of bitcoin price, and the other crypto assets probably going to rise more or less with bitcoin.”
See related article: Bitcoin is “better form of value” than fiat, says Binance CEO CZ
- Will decentralized finance (DeFi) continue its explosive growth? “DeFi was hot in 2020, I think it will continue to grow, but I’m skeptical that it will be hot again. I think it’ll continue to grow, but we don’t need to see another crazy exponential jump.”
- Elon Musk will buy bitcoin for Tesla: “I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few months he [Elon Musk] announces that finally Tesla owns, I don’t know, how many bitcoins. And that’ll be really good for the industry. But I think it’s going to happen sooner or later — maybe this year, maybe next year. Who knows?”
See related article: Binance’s CZ on bitcoin prices: Is crypto in a bubble or bull run?