Bitcoin may have been flirting with $60,000 for weeks, but Morgan Creek’s Mark Yusko says that the base-layer of this digital ecosystem has a lot of room for growth.

The investment manager and chief investment officer expects the cryptocurrency could reach $250,000 within five years, which is a more conservative estimate than many predictions floating around in cyber space. He says the key is that bitcoin is much more than just a token of value – something he believes many investors overlook and underestimate. Indeed, bitcoin is the dominant monetary network that offers pristine collateral in a digital era.

Want to acquire Bitcoin, Litecoin and other crypto? Start here.

Speaking on CNBC’s Trading Nation, Yusko said that bitcoin is”just about network adoption and increased usage“. He continued:

This is a network and networks grow in an exponential way. This is the fastest network in history to a trillion dollars of value, right on the heels of the FAANGS that took, you know, 15 to 20 years  depending on which one you look at.

His modest $250,000 target is based on a gold equivalence; if gold’s monetary value is $4 trillion, then digital gold should move up to that total – a sum that puts the price at a quarter of a million per coin.

The Morgan Creek CIO continued:

What people miss is this is a technological evolution of computing power that isn’t going away, it is a powerful computing network that is going to become the base layer protocol for the Internet of value.

It’s not just bitcoin that has rallied significantly this year. Indeed, Litecoin and Ethereum are both up in triple digits.

It’s not just bitcoin that has rallied this year. Litecoin and Ethereum are both up triple digits, and have been outperforming bitcoin in recent weeks as noted in the semi-weekly newsletter.

Still, bitcoin is the gold standard in the crypto world, asserts Yusko. He likens the phenomenon in a similar fashion to the way in which the internet works. Specifically, bitcoin is the base layer protocol like TCP/IP, the foundation that allows computers to communicate, while a cryptocurrency like Ethereum is akin to the ‘www dot’, i.e. the toolkit that form the application layer of the internet.

In Mark’s view, about 5 to 6 crypto protocols will come out on top apart from bitcoin.

He said: “So, yes, there’s room for a couple of protocols to survive, but there are  1000s of coins and Doge is in that category that really are useless,  they’re just utility tokens that have no underlying value or use case  and they’ll eventually disappear.”

Bitcoin is up 98% this year. While the king’s prices have been weighed down this last month, bitcoin miners have continued to buy up relatively cheap bitcoin, taking advantage of the relatively calm atmosphere.

Subscribe to the semi-weekly newsletter for regular insight into bitcoin and crypto. Go on. It’s free.

Join the telegram channel for updates, charts, ideas and deals.

Did you like the article? Share it!