Update May 3: Alexis Ohanian revised his $15,000 ethereum price forecast, telling Fortune that he misspoke and meant to say that ETH would reach $1,500 in 2018. Below is the article as it was originally published.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said that he predicts the ethereum price will reach $15,000 in 2018, rocketing its market cap into the trillions of dollars and enabling it to surpass bitcoin as the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Ohanian, who now works full-time at Initialized Capital –a venture capital firm he co-founded in 2012 — made this bullish ethereum price prediction during an interview with Fortune , explaining that he believes this project has more long-term potential than any other currently-existent cryptocurrency.
“I still hold a little bit of Bitcoin, and I think it has such mindshare that it will continue to be a store of value. I’m most bullish about Ethereum simply because people are actually building on it,” he said, predicting later that “ At the end of the year, Bitcoin will be at $20,000. And Ethereum will be at $15,000.”
“Great, now people can call me out if I’m wrong,” he added.
Under this forecast, ethereum would roar to a $1.5 trillion market cap — up from $67 billion — in just seven short months, while bitcoin would recover back to the all-time high it set last December, bringing its market cap to approximately $340 billion.
Elsewhere in the interview, Ohanian said that Initialized — which has already invested in cryptocurrency industry giant Coinbase — has determined to make blockchain-related investments a particular focus of its efforts in 2018 and that it believes the technology will lay the foundation for a “new Internet.”
“Last year, it was all about AI and machine learning, This year, it’s all about blockchain. Most of it is just hype and BS, just like how it was with AI and ML,” he said. “Most of the really vital, protocol-level, basic infrastructure around software and blockchain will need to get built in the next year or two for us to really see the Web 3.0 we’re really hoping for.”
“These are the types of things I think will build the foundation for a very different, much better Internet,” he concluded. “I was a kid in the 90s without much leverage when the first Internet was being built, so I see this as a hell of an opportunity. We’re still figuring it out. We still don’t have a Netscape, but it’s coming.”
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