Bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have jumped today with ethereum rival cardano making a huge leap higher—even after Coinbase revealed an ethereum surprise last week.
The bitcoin price remains off the closely-watched $50,000 per bitcoin level but ethereum has climbed back over the $3,000 mark after dipping under it earlier today.
Now, as cardano and solana make double-digit gains and outpace other cryptocurrencies, famed investment strategist Lyn Alden has predicted bitcoin will hit $100,000 and ethereum will reach $5,000 as soon as next year.
"I think we're still in kind of the early-to-mid stage of its long-term trajectory," Alden, who founded Lyn Alden Investment Strategy in 2016, told Insider in an interview. "So that remains, I think, the best risk-reward as kind of a set-it-and-forget-it allocation."
Alden believes bitcoin had a good chance of topping $100,000 at some point before the end of 2022 while a supply squeeze caused by a recent ethereum upgrade is "tactically bullish" and could send the ethereum price soaring to over $5,000.
The combined cryptocurrency market has recently returned to over $2 trillion, fueling many bullish bitcoin and ethereum predictions.
Bloomberg Intelligence senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone has also said bitcoin could soon hit $100,000 while Tom Lee, the head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, thinks bitcoin is due a surge higher and will rally strongly through the second half of 2021.
The latest crypto rally has seen two rivals to ethereum's blockchain, cardano and solana, more than double in the last month alone.
"I think solana is a well-designed ethereum competitor," Alden said. "Its main risk is that it's newer. It doesn't really have a significant network effect yet. And so it hasn't really reached a critical mass, but it is well-designed."
Solana has close links with the rapidly growing FTX crypto exchange—FTX's sister company Alameda Research is an investor in solana, and FTX also operates its own decentralized exchange called Serum on the solana blockchain.
Cardano, now the third-biggest cryptocurrency by value after bitcoin and ethereum with a total value of $75 billion, has surged 30% during the last week as investors eye a much-anticipated upgrade that's due to be released on September 12. The completed upgrade will enable the cardano blockchain to support smart contracts and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
"The upgrade will help cardano to match ethereum's capabilities," Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad, chief product officer at Vienna-based brokerage Bitpanda, wrote in an emailed note.
Alden is less confident when it comes to cardano, however.
"We have to see what happens with cardano," Alden said. "They have a lot of pipe, but they've had pretty slow development, so I tend to prefer solana over cardano."