Bitcoin (BTC) will hit a new all-time high in late 2024 because of a long-feared United States recession and regulatory shifts after the next U.S. presidential election, asset manager VanEck predicts.

On Dec. 8, VanEck made 15 crypto predictions for 2024, including price forecasts, the timing of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) launches, the impact of the Bitcoin halving, and emerging dominant crypto platforms.

VanEck 15 Crypto Predictions for 2024

Prediction #1. The US recession will finally arrive, but so will the first spot #Bitcoin ETFs. Over $2.4B may flow into these ETFs in Q1 2024 to support Bitcoin’s price.

— VanEck (@vaneck_us) December 7, 2023

VanEck is among several firms, including BlackRock and Fidelity, that are vying for an approved spot Bitcoin ETF, as well as a spot Ethereum ETF. 

.4 billion to flow into Bitcoin ETFs in Q1

VanEck is confident that the first spot Bitcoin ETFs will be approved in the first quarter of 2024. However, it also had a gloomy prediction for the U.S. economy.

“The US recession will finally arrive, but so will the first spot Bitcoin ETFs,” it stated before predicting that “more than $2.4 billion may flow into these ETFs in Q1 2024 to support Bitcoin’s price.”

The firm also stated that the BTC halving, due in April or May, “will see minimal market disruption,” but there will be a post-halving price rise.

VanEck predicts that Bitcoin will make an all-time high in Q4 2024, “potentially spurred by political events and regulatory shifts following a U.S. presidential election.”

The U.S. presidential elections are scheduled to be held on Nov. 5, 2024.

Ether won’t flip Bitcoin

The firm also said it believes Ether (ETH) won’t likely flip Bitcoin in 2024 but will still outperform major tech stocks.

“Like past cycles, Bitcoin will lead the market to rally, and the value will flow into smaller tokens just after the halving. ETH won’t begin outperforming Bitcoin until post-halving and may outperform for the year, but there will be no ‘flippening,’” writes VanEck.

Despite this, Ether’s market share will be challenged by other smart contract platforms such as Solana, which has “less uncertainty surrounding their scalability roadmap,” it predicted.

Ethereum is the current industry standard for smart contracts, with a market capitalization of $285 billion. Solana is a rival high-throughput blockchain with a market cap of $30 billion.

However, Ethereum layer-2 networks will capture the majority of Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible total value locked and trading volume once the EIP-4844 scaling update is implemented, it said.

Decentralization to hurt AI monopolies

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) also made several predictions in their Big Ideas in Tech for 2024 report released on Dec. 6, though the focus was more on artificial intelligence and decentralization. A16z is one of the industry’s largest venture capital (VC) firms, investing millions of dollars every year in Web3 startups.

The VC firm believes crypto could help move AI out of the grasp of a few tech giants, such as OpenAI, Google and Meta, into the wider Web3 community.

Just a few things we're excited for in crypto (2024):

→ Entering a new era of decentralization
→ Resetting the UX of the future
→The rise of the modular tech stack
→ AI + blockchains come together
→ Play to earn becomes play and earn
→ When AI becomes the gamemaker,… pic.twitter.com/fiL4Eahwuy

— a16z crypto (@a16zcrypto) December 6, 2023

It said that decentralized networks counterbalance centralized AI models, which currently require massive resources only accessible to tech giants.

However, crypto networks can enable permissionless markets where anyone can contribute computing power and data to train large language models, and there will be more of this in 2024.

“With crypto, it becomes possible to create multi-sided, global, permissionless markets where anyone can contribute — and be compensated — for contributing compute or a new dataset to the network.”

Related: Bitcoin to the moon! Top 5 BTC price predictions for 2024 and beyond

VanEck also predicted that Binance would lose the top position as a centralized exchange by trading volume as competitors like Coinbase, OKX, Bybit and Bitget compete for leadership.

Binance has been under regulatory pressure globally, which recently culminated in its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, a highly influential industry leader, stepping down amid a $4.3 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department.

Meanwhile, stablecoin market capitalization will reach $200 billion, Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) will make a comeback, decentralized exchanges will reach a new peak for spot trading volumes, and Know Your Customer (KYC)-compliant decentralized finance platforms will likely surpass non-KYC ones, it predicted.

“KYC-enabled and walled garden apps like those using Ethereum Attestation Service or Uniswap Hooks will gain significant traction, approaching or even flipping non-KYC applications in user base and fees.“

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