Zhu Fa, co-founder of crypto mining pool Poolin, has made a bullish statement on Bitcoin’s price. In a WeChat group he predicted that Bitcoin would surge to new highs 10-20 times the level it reached in the previous bull run.
Bitcoin is now in its longest ever bear market, having crashed from record highs near $20,000 to recent lows touching $3,000.Poolin is the operator of the third-largest mining pool according to BTC.com, with a current hashrate of 5.9 EH/s (out of a total of 44 EH/s) and a network share of 13.4%.
To give an idea of scale, an S9 Antminer has a hashrate of 13.5TH/s, so Poolin has the equivalent of around half a million ASIC miners in its pool.
Predictions from experts in various aspects of the crypto space have ranged from bullish to extremely bearish. During a blockchain event in April 2018, investment tycoon Tim Draper forecasted that by 2022 the price of Bitcoin could reach $250,000.
Earlier this week, Barry Silbert, CEO and founder of Digital Currency Group and Grayscale Investments, said that the value of most digital tokens “will go to zero." He added that, "Almost every [initial coin offering] ICO was just an attempt to raise money but there was no use for the underlying token."
Zhu’s mining pool, Poolin, has 10.45 percent of global network share, according to BTC.com. The current bear market has hit cryptocurrency miners hard. Some mining companies in China have started selling off hardware by the kilogram.
Earlier today, United Kingdom-based cryptocurrency miner Argo Blockchain announced it was refocusing its business in order to cut costs. Argo is terminating its Mining-as-a-Service (MaaS) operations by April, which purportedly could cut costs by as much as 35 percent.
