Bitcoin experts explain why it's set to rally to $200,000 this year

Bitcoin experts explain why it's set to rally to $200,000 this year originally appeared on TheStreet.

Bitcoin hit a fresh all-time high north of $112,000 on Wednesday and according to the experts who saw that coming, the same factors may push it north of $200,000 by year’s end.

A surge in corporate Bitcoin treasury purchases, ETF inflows, and usability as a reserve asset will accelerate in the back half of the year, according to Bitwise’s Head of Alpha Strategies Jeff Park and XBTO Managing Director Mas Nakachi. Speaking on a live panel at the Coinage studio, the duo explained that treasury purchases are sapping up marginal bitcoin at an increasing clip.

“It's over $15 billion, and that number is bigger than the first half of Bitcoin ETF flows that we experienced in 2024,” Park said. “So the structural change we're seeing is a pretty meaningful one. And the other thing I love about these Bitcoin treasury companies, for the most part, these are never gonna sell Bitcoin.”

That “never sell your Bitcoin” mantra has been led by Michael Saylor at Strategy for years, stacking Bitcoin and now sitting on nearly $25 billion in paper profits. But as other publicly traded companies step in to emulate his Bitcoin treasury strategy, price is expanding rapidly, with the crypto advancing nearly 50% over the last three months. Park predicts that can fuel a rise to $200,000 by the end of the year.

“Our price target — and this is Bitwise’s price target … is that we’re going to hit $200K by the end of the year,” Park said. “I think that’s a low-hanging fruit.”

But corporate buys are just one element of Bitcoin’s next chapter, as Mas Nakachi explained. For years, Bitcoin has been sold as digital gold, without many ways to start to unlock the value of it. So far, it’s mostly been held and not been used natively onchain to unlock yield. But now, more and more projects are popping up to give holders ways to actually use their bitcoin.

“That store of value [narrative] is the thing that's obviously resonating right now … the whole point of why Wall Street is adopting Bitcoin,” he said. “But ultimately it does have to evolve beyond that, and that's going to be sort of the next phase of what it means for everyone to understand how to use Bitcoin.”

So called Bitcoin Layer-2s like Botanix, Stacks, and others have popped up to leverage Bitcoin’s standing as a store of value to secure settlement layers, and bring DeFi to Bitcoin. Nakachi, who backed Botanix in an earlier investment round at XBTO, said it’s a necessary evolution to help secure Bitcoin’s future as miner rewards continue to systematically decline with every four-year halving cycle.

“I think, you know, it's great that people are waking up to the store value narrative, but there is a but after that,” he said. “And that's where the sort of other on the investing side, how we incentivize people and projects to build on Bitcoin becomes very important.”

Bitcoin experts explain why it's set to rally to $200,000 this year first appeared on TheStreet on Jul 10, 2025

This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jul 10, 2025, where it first appeared.