Tim Draper sticks to $250,000 bitcoin price forecast

The price of bitcoin will reach $250,000 by early 2023, despite the FTX collapse crisis. This was stated by venture investor and billionaire Tim Draper in an interview with Cointelegraph.

“There are no changes to the price forecast,” he stressed.

According to Draper, the FTX collapse has nothing to do with Bitcoin’s success, since it is decentralized, while Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange is not.

“FTX was centralized, depended on a single founder. When a currency is centralized — for example, by a central bank — it has a single point of failure, and it can be manipulated,” the billionaire explained.

The current crisis will lead to even greater decentralization in the crypto industry, Draper suggested:

“I think this FTX fiasco will attract a far larger group of bitcoin maximalists. Note that your money is not protected in a centralized system, whether it’s crypto or fiat.”

He also emphasised the importance of self-custody, but expressed trust in the bitcoin exchange Coinbase. According to the investor, he stores his assets on that platform and in the hardware wallet Ledger.

“They do not use my tokens for lending or investing,” the billionaire noted.

Earlier, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong made a similar statement. He stressed that users of the exchange are not at risk, and the company itself does not control client assets without their knowledge.

In 2018, Draper predicted bitcoin at $250,000 by 2022. Later he expanded the forecast to early 2023, and more recently pushed it out by another six months.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao drew a parallel between the current industry situation and the 2008 financial crisis. He believes more companies could fail in the near term.

Earlier, Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire compared FTX troubles to the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

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