Bitcoin’s biggest test may come at next TradFi sell-off

Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2022. In this series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain-related fields tell Forkast.News their predictions for the year ahead.

Leah Wald

Leah Wald is the chief executive officer of Valkyrie, a Bitcoin investment group that launched one of the first Bitcoin futures ETFs in the United States in 2021. Wald is also a board member at Cypherpunk Holdings and an advisor to the Straits Currency Fund. Before joining the Bitcoin world, she spent time in traditional finance through roles such as a financial analyst to the CEO of Vital Financial and a consultant to the World Bank vice president of the Africa region. 

Predictions for 2022

Ethereum might pull a flippening

“[ETH] appears to be consolidating, potentially before a run at 5K right now. And that’s up more than 530% on the year versus just 100% for Bitcoin. So there are more conversations these days about a ‘flippening.’ So that’ll probably be a big limelight. Obviously, what’s going to happen to DeFi next year — many of the projects are built on Ethereum, but it isn’t the only protocol that’s seeing that heightened interest. I read that DeFi total value locked [in Ethereum] is over US$111 billion, which is just shy of all-time highs. And then, of course, we have the metaverse and everything that’s happening in NFTs”

Bitcoin ETFs make naysayers scarce

“We launched our Bitcoin Trust in January and we were begging for meetings. No one wanted to talk to us. You got the first Bitcoin ETF traded this year, and now banks are all willing to have conversations with most people from the street, both main and Wall…. So what hopefully we’ll see less of is those more archaic mindsets that we’ve been seeing up until recently, which is just kind of naysayer-like attitudes towards Bitcoin or the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

Will Bitcoin pass the TradFi test?

“Whether it’s next year or the year after, there will be a market correction in traditional equities and the global markets, and I am curious to see how Bitcoin and cryptos do when there is another global sell-off, and if there’s more of a correlation or less of a correlation. Do they rebound faster? Do more people see Bitcoin as that digital store value? And is there more inflow into it? The real make or break will be on the horizon and I hope that we don’t see a bear market or a crypto winter anytime soon, but one day it will come, and that’s just the cycle of the markets. I’m very much looking to next year to see if there are any indications to show that there’s some sort of cataclysmic event in global equities and how crypto will fare.”