Bitcoin may be mired in a bear market, but there’s a case for the token to rocket to $170,000 sometime in the next 12 months.
JPMorgan said it saw the crypto potentially climbing 84% over the next six to 12 months, citing a projection from its model that assumes bitcoin will trade similarly to the price of gold.
“Our volatility-adjusted bitcoin comparison to gold metric continues to imply a theoretical bitcoin price of close to $170k, suggesting significant upside for bitcoin over the next 6-12 months,” a team of strategists led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a client note on Wednesday.
Such a rally would come on the back of a difficult few months for bitcoin, which has tumbled into a bear market amid a general risk-off shift, worries about the path of interest rates in 2026, and concerns about Strategy, the bitcoin treasury firm founded by Michael Saylor.
Bitcoin traded around $92,593 on Wednesday, down approximately 26% from its all-time high of over $126,000 earlier this year. The crypto is now down for the year.
JPMorgan, though, has floated the possibility that bitcoin could be trading more similarly to gold for years. This was most prominently exhibited in April, when concerns about tariffs drove a historic sell-off in US stocks and led to inflows into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Strategists also said they were eyeing two factors to potentially influence the price of bitcoin over the near-term:
1. Strategy holding on to its bitcoin
David Becker for BI
Fears have risen recently that bitcoin holding company Strategy could start dumping some of its tokens as the prices crash and its premium stock price relative to bitcoin comes down.
Strategy holding onto its bitcoins would be a positive for the crypto, JPMorgan said. The firm is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, though rumors that it could sell some of its tokens began to pick up steam last month.
Arkham Intel, a crypto analytics firm, estimated that Strategy had around 437,000 bitcoin tokens in its coffers in November, down from a peak of around 484,000 tokens earlier in the month. Previously, the firm said it believed it had identified around 97% of Strategy’s total bitcoin holdings.
Phong Le, Strategy’s CEO, recently suggested that the firm could eventually sell its bitcoin if its mNAV were to dip below a threshold of 1. That metric, which measures Strategy’s market value relative to the value of its bitcoin holdings, is hovering around 1.1, according to the latest data on the company’s website.
JPMorgan strategists noted that the firm recently announced it had raised $1.4 billion in cash reserves. That fund could cover costs like dividend and interest payments for about two years without the company having to sell bitcoin, strategists estimated, adding that they saw forced selling as “even less likely” with the reserves on hand.
“If this ratio stays above 1.0 and MicroStrategy can eventually avoid selling bitcoins, markets will likely be reassured and the worst for bitcoin prices will likely be behind us,” strategists said.
2. Strategy remaining in the MSCI
The MSCI is deciding in January if it will exclude companies from its indices that have 50% or more of their assets invested in digital assets.
If it were to move forward with that rule, that would take Strategy out of the MSCI US and MSCI Global indexes, something that could spark around $2.8 billion worth of outflows from the stock, JPMorgan previously estimated.
“On the other hand, if the MSCI decision on January 15th were positive, then both MicroStrategy and bitcoin will likely rebound strongly towards pre-October 10th levels,” the bank wrote, suggesting the crypto could rise back to all-time-highs in that scenario.