Raoul Pal says 'reasonable chance' crypto market cap could 100X by 2030

Former Goldman Sachs hedge fund manager and Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal thinks that the crypto market cap could increase 100X by the end of this decade.

At the time of writing, the total market cap of the global crypto sector stands at $2.2 trillion, and Pal told podcast Bankless Brasil “there’s a reasonable chance” this figure could grow to around $250 trillion if the crypto network adoption models continue on their current trajectory.

Pal drew comparisons between the current benchmarks of other markets and asset classes such as equities, bonds and real estate, noting that they all have a market cap between “$250-$350 trillion.”

“If I look at the total derivatives market, it’s $1 quadrillion. I think there’s a reasonable chance of this being a $250 trillion asset class, which is 100X from here, which would be the largest growth of any asset class in all of history in the shortest period of time.”

“That will pretty much dovetail in with the idea that 3.5 billion people are using it — that’s just extrapolating the growth numbers of the network. So if [there are] 3.5 billion users in 2030, well the market cap’s going to be something like $250 trillion,” he added.

One thing is for certain, it's not going to get there in a straight line upward.The total crypto market cap has dropped 6.8% over the past 24 hours amid a significant pullback across most major assets. Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Coin (BNB) are 7.6%, 9% and 9.1% within that same time frame.

Related: Bitcoin price drops to $43.7K after Fed minutes re-confirm plans to hike rates

The recent downturn may even be a surprise to Pal, during an interview on Dec. 27, the investor predicted that Bitcoin would have a strong start to 2022 as he believed at the time a period of institutional sell-offs and end of year profit-taking was over.

“It looks like they’re done because the market has been chopping around for the past week, which was the traditional last week of everybody squaring their books,” he said.

In November, Pal predicted that the bull run won’t end in December like the previous cycles of 2015 and 2017, and will instead be extended until around June. Pal cited heavy institutional inflows in Q1 as a major reason behind this.