Published: April 30th, 2025
Bitcoin could surge to a new all-time high of USD 120,000 by the end of the second quarter, according to a new analysis by Standard Chartered.
In a note to investors published this week, the bank said that strategic portfolio reallocations away from American assets, plus growing institutional appetite for crypto, is likely to push BTC even higher in the coming weeks.
Standard analysts wrote that ‘we are now looking at these cumulative factors as supports that will propel Bitcoin to a fresh all-time high in the range of USD 120,000 by the end of the second quarter.’
The note points to a number of key factors underpinning the bullish BTC outlook. One is the term premiums on US treasuries, which are now at their highest point in more than ten years. This points to heightened demand for non-dollar assets. Whale movement around Bitcoin has also intensified alongside growing corporate and institutional accumulation.
Recent ETF flows also suggest investor capital is moving from gold into Bitcoin, while time-of-day analysis indicates American investors are offloading domestic assets in favor of riskier alternative assets like Bitcoin.
With Bitcoin trading above USD 95,000 at time of writing, the number one cryptocurrency has risen by a factor of seven from lows seen in December 2022
Standard Chartered is holding firm on its year-end BTC price forecast of USD 200,000, noting that this quarter's predicted breakout could bring that figure into sharper focus.
February 2025 data from CoinWarz showed that Bitcoin's mining difficulty metric had reached an all-time high of 114.6 trillion. The rise coincided with moves in the Hash Ribbon, a market indicator used by crypto traders to capture phases of mining capitulation and recovery, which can significantly influence BTC price movements. CoinWarz said the market had reached its capitulation point, when mining costs exceed profitability.
Historically, when the hash ribbon signals capitulation, it has marked a price bottom for BTC. Data from Glassnode show that miner capitulation started at the beginning of February. BTC's price had also dropped by about four per cent for the month-to-date.
If the pattern holds through Q2, CoinWarz says Bitcoin's new bottom will sit at around USD 91,000. The previous capitulation point happened in October 2024, just prior to BTC rocketing upward by 50 per cent.
The parallel rise in Bitcoin's mining difficulty metric has been caused by the rising hash rate for BTC transactions, which hit a new all-time high on February 5th. As difficulty rises, mining gets harder, requiring more computing resources, time, and energy.
Glassnode said recent mining production data reflects this, as only one publicly-traded mining company, Riot Platforms (RIOT), reported a month-over-month production increase in March 2025.
Taken together, the figures suggest that the world's number one crypto is following a trajectory last seen in 2017, up by about 580 per cent from the 2022 low reached in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. At the same stage in the 2017 cycle, BTC had risen by approximately 530 per cent.
In October 2023, BTC's mining difficulty reached a new high when it rose by 6.48 per cent, significantly raising the computational bar for miners seeking to uncover blocks.
Data from CoinWarz tracked the required number of hashes needed to mine a block at 61.02 trillion, marking the third consecutive rise in difficulty faced by miners since August of that year, and nearly double the difficulty level reached in October 2022.
Bitcoin's network is set to readjust every 2,016 blocks (in practice this has meant roughly once a fortnight), as the blockchain measures whether mining activity has increased or reduced the time needed to find a new block. An increase in time usually means more miners have joined the network.
The network responds by raising the level of mining difficulty. The complex equations that need to be solved become even more complex, and miners have to apply more computational power in order to mine a block.
Some analysts blamed the spike in activity on the upcoming Bitcoin halving, which was then about six months away.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Jeffery May, an executive with crypto exchange BTSE, said that the surge in mining activity ‘probably (meant) everyone is trying to maximise returns before next year's halving. After it happens, the rewards for BTC mining will be cut by fifty per cent. Miners are surely trying to wring every bit of value out of their equipment before the cutoff.’
‘We expect to see a rush of miners coming online between now and April 2024. It will be in every miner's interest to maximize use of their equipment at the current payout rate of 6.25 BTC/per block. After the halving that drops to 3.125 BTC/block.’
Significant changes in mining activity usually signal that something is afoot in the crypto trading market. It might be an upcoming network event like the planned halving for BTC, or indicate that gains or losses for a given crypto asset are imminent.
In February 2023, leading Bitcoin Miner Iris Energy said that its hash rate was rising again after a notable downturn at the end of 2022. The company's self-mining capacity rose from two exahashes per second to five.
A single exahash equates to one quintillion hashes, which represent possible solutions to the complex math equations required to approve and confirm a Bitcoin transaction.
According to figures from Glassnode, BTC's price rise above USD 20,000 helped push the average Bitcoin miner back into the black, even taking into account the hefty costs of operating a mining machine.
A press release on Iris Energy's website said the firm had also agreed a financing deal with Bitmain, the manufacturer of Antminer cryptocurrency mining servers, to purchase a round of new S19j Pro miners. That expanded Iris's data centre capacity by 4.4 exahashes per second.
