• Finder conducts quarterly survey of 53 crypto experts
• They predict bitcoin will end at US$25,473 in 2022
• 10% say it’s time to sell out, 50% buy
• 70% think ‘winter’ will continue until at least 2023
• Interest rates and Terra’s collapse are to blame.

Australian cryptocurrency experts have cut their predictions on bitcoin’s value by two-thirds by the end of 2022 in just six months as rising interest rates undermine digital assets.

A panel regularly convened by comparison site Finder expects bitcoin to regain some ground from hovering around $20,000 to see the year around $25,473. But that figure is only a third of their forecast of $76,360 in January this year.

The Finder panel remains extremely bullish on bitcoin, estimating a 413% gain over the next three years to reach US$106,757 by 2025, for a staggering 1.411% jump from its current price to US$314,314 by 2030.

But for now, amid forecasts of further near-term decline, the HODL is down to just $13,676 this year.

Finder regularly conducts surveys on what industry experts think about future trends in the price of bitcoin – a weekly survey with a panel of five looking 14 days ahead, and a quarterly survey, released this weekasking 53 industry experts how Bitcoin will perform over the next decade.

Crypto crashed just after the release of the previous survey, when they had $65,185 at the end of 2022.

It has also made them bearish from their estimates 12 months ago, more than halving the forecasts that saw BTC reach US$265,000 in 2025 and $706,000 by 2030.

Leading academics in the panel call for time for crypto.

John Hawkins, of the University of Canberra, says it’s time to get out of bitcoin altogether, forecasting bitcoin’s value again by half in the second half of 2022 to US$10,000 amid a speculative bubble collapse .

“BTC is clearly not a store of value given its price volatility. It is not a medium of exchange – almost no store accepts it. It’s not a unit of account — the only things priced in it are other cryptocurrencies,” Hawkins told the Finder survey.

“So it’s not money or real currency, it’s nothing but a speculative bubble that is imploding.”

Lee Smales, associate professor of finance at the University of Western Australia, agrees

“Investors will continue to exit risky assets, with the riskiest assets experiencing the most substantial declines. Recent months have shown that cryptocurrency that acts as a hedge against inflation is a misconception,” he said.

Carol Alexander, professor of finance at the University of Sussex, is blunt and brash: “Bitcoin is purely speculative [and] has no use value for Web 3 development”.

That said, youust 10% of the panel say it’s time to sell Bitcoin. Meanwhile, 50% argue it’s time to buy and 40% chose HODLing.

Two things that a vast majority of the panel agrees on are that we are in a crypto winter — a prolonged period of flat trading after a price crash — and interest rates are a major driver.

crypto winter

More than three quarters (77%) of the quarterly panel agree that we are at the beginning of a crypto winter, while 8% say we are not and the remaining 15% are unsure. Less than a third (29%) see recovery this year. Nearly half (46%) say it will take until 2023 and 24% say it will take until 2024 or longer.

According to the panel, global interest rate hikes were kryptonite for crypto, with 70% saying rising rates were the main driver of the May price crash, followed by the implosion of Terra (LUNA) (68%), central banks tightening balance sheets (47% ) ) and rising inflation (40%).

Vetle Lunde, an analyst at Arcane Research, warns that “Further tightening and settlement of bad crypto debt will lead to sobering times, and investors should scramble for more trouble.”

dr. Dimitrios Salampasis, director of the Swinburne University of Technology, blamed the collapse of Terra (LUNA) and a lack of regulation.

“The current crypto market suffers from contagion due to high interconnectivity and lack of proper regulation. What [we] Also to observe is that numerous quasi-DeFi and quasi-CeFi schemes fail to deliver, demonstrating how weak the fundamentals of the entire crypto market are,” he said.

“In addition, we see that crypto is indeed sensitive to external market and economic forces. In general, some prevailing stories are reverse engineered.”

University of East London co-director Dr Iwa Salami sees the current crash as a necessary part of digital Darwinism.

“I believe there is a need to remove unscrupulous actors in space, and leave robust projects at the end of it,” he said.

Overnight crypto lender Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York federal court, a month after it frozen customer accounts and blocked withdrawals. The filing states that Celsius had between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets, a similar level of liabilities and more than 100,000 creditors.

You can read more on the Find the views of the bitcoin panel here.