Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt

Veteran trader Peter Brandt has pushed back on one of Bitcoin’s most aggressive long-term price targets.

“2030, we don’t go to a million,” Brandt tells Cointelegraph on the Chain Reaction show.

Despite strong calls from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood for Bitcoin to reach $1 million within the next four years, Brandt says that timeline is nowhere close to realistic.

Brandt argues that the path to $1 million depends on fundamental changes in the global monetary system, rather than greater adoption or speculative momentum.

“For Bitcoin to go to $1,000,000, that’s basically, let’s say, a 10x move for fair value,” he says, explaining that the purchasing power of the US dollar would need to decline by a 5x value, a scenario he doesn’t see as likely over the next four years.

“Then you get the volatility and both sides of fair value by Bitcoin, which at some point would put it up to a million dollars,” he says, adding:

“So at some point, we’re going to see the whole store-of-value structure in the world change,” he says.

Brandt doesn’t dismiss the milestone entirely however. “Eventually, we will go to a million,” he says.

While Brandt says Bitcoin’s current fair value is difficult to pin down in the volatile market, if he had to estimate it, he would place it in the $80,000 to $100,000 range. Based on that range, Bitcoin is modestly undervalued by at least 12% in Brandt’s eyes at the time of publication, as it trades at $71,102.

Who is Peter Brandt?

Brandt started trading commodities back in 1975, decades before the vast majority of his 940,000 social media followers were even born. He began with soybeans and moved onto… corn!

In the intervening years he became one of the most respected chartists in finance, with economist and author Barry Ritholtz naming him among the 30 most influential people in the finance industry.

Brandt’s book Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader, became Amazon’s No. 1 trading book for 27 weeks in 2011. He’s now a leading analyst of the Bitcoin charts, though his cheeky pronouncements on Ethereum and XRP are less well received by their respective communities. In mid 2025 however, he told Magazine he owns both assets, so he can’t hate them too much.

Bitcoin will end up resembling gold’s volatility levels

Brandt believes Bitcoin’s volatility will trend downwards to eventually resemble gold’s, with large draw-downs of 40% to 50% — like the one we just experienced — becoming a thing of the past.

“When we see that, we will know that Bitcoin truly has settled into a legitimate store of value, but it just doesn’t recognize it yet,” Brandt says.

“The natural advance of Bitcoin to make up for a loss of purchasing power of the US dollars, let’s say 10% a year, at some point in time, that is going to be the gradual advance in the price of Bitcoin when Bitcoin becomes fairly valued,” he says.

Bitcoin will become the global choice within the next two decades: Brandt

Brandt still hopes that Bitcoin will become the primary unit of currency in the global economic system over the next “10 to 20 years.”

“But we’re not there yet…I think we’ll eventually go there, though,” Brandt says.

But his long term optimism is tempered by near term bearishness on the price.

Brandt says that Bitcoin falling to $60,000 on Feb. 6 may not be the lowest level for 2026, forecasting that Bitcoin could retest or even move “slightly lower” than that price level in September or October this year. 

“That would then be the bear cycle low,” he says.

It’s worth taking Brandt’s predictions with a grain of salt, because he previously told Magazine that any crypto trader who thinks they can accurately predict prices is delusional.

“Anyone that looks at the charts and tries to tell you where anything is going is actually just kind of fooling themselves,” Brandt told Magazine in March 2025.