Bitcoin to Hit Between $500K and $1 Million, Predicts CZ Ex-Binance CEO

Changpeng Zhao, who is widely known throughout the crypto world as CZ, a Binance co-founder and its former chief executive officer, has once again sent ripples through the crypto community. This week, CZ sat down to give an interview to Rug Radio’s CEO, Farokh Sarmad.

In this interview, CZ shared his view on meme coins, the time he spent in jail last year, Donald Trump’s second presidency, and other interesting things. CZ also made an important Bitcoin price prediction, saying that he expects Bitcoin to jump to at least half a million dollars per coin.

CZ predicts Bitcoin to hit between $500K and $1 million

Like many other top cryptocurrency influencers known for founding big, successful, and influential projects, CZ often gets asked about how high he expects Bitcoin to go over the next few years or whether it is likely to reach $1 million after all in the future.

This interview with Farokh Sarmad contained the same question. CZ stated that this cycle, he expects the largest cryptocurrency in the world to reach at least $500,000 per coin or go even higher and trade somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million per unit. This is not the first time CZ has voiced this prediction recently.

In April, when he visited a crypto event in Pakistan and sat down to talk to Bilal bin Saqib, the CEO of the Pakistan Crypto Council, CZ said that the one-million-dollar threshold is likely to be not only taken but also surpassed by Bitcoin. However, Zhao said that he did not expect it to happen this year. His view on Bitcoin growth is a long-term one, he said, adding that the crypto industry is still very much early, but a lot of people still expect things to happen instantaneously.

In the same interview in Pakistan, CZ said he firmly believes that sooner or later, many governments would want to buy Bitcoin, looking at the US and the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that Donald Trump has ordered to be created. However, CZ pointed out that the nation that begins to buy Bitcoin now, while the price is not so high, will get a significant price advantage.

CZ on the US government’s plans to buy Bitcoin

In this week’s interview with Sarmad, CZ not only predicted Bitcoin reaching between half a million and a million dollars. He also made one prediction which targeted this year specifically – by the end of 2025, he believes that the cryptocurrency market’s capitalization will rocket to $5 trillion from the current $2.93 trillion (data taken from CoinMarketCap).

When asked if he thought that the institutionalization of Bitcoin would be harmful to its original ethos given to it by Satoshi Nakamoto, CZ philosophically replied that there are two sides to a coin, and there are pros and cons. 

On the one hand, he calls himself a fan of decentralization and prefers that all retail holders buy in before institutions. But now that the US government intends to buy 1 million Bitcoins over the next four to five years, they might not have enough resources for that, since the US government buying Bitcoin (and other governments following suit in the future) would definitely push the Bitcoin price upwards, CZ is certain. Apparently, this is the solid basis for his $1-million-Bitcoin price prediction.

But, overall, he said that this is how the world works, and all retail holders had 15 years’ head start on the US government and plenty of time to buy all the Bitcoin they wanted.

Speaking of the crypto reserve, last month CZ visited Kyrgyzstan, participating in meetings about putting the country on the crypto tracks. This month, Binance signed a memo of understanding with the country’s government, helping them set up internal crypto payments with Binance Academy to help launch educational courses in crypto and blockchain. The Kyrgyz president, Sadyr Japarov, invited CZ to become a member of the country’s National Crypto Committee.

Zhao accepted that offer and suggested that Kyrgyzstan should create a strategic crypto reserve consisting of Binance Coin (BNB) and Bitcoin. After that news, VanEck fund manager filed for permission to launch a BNB-based exchange-traded fund (ETF). But this step has been ridiculed on social media since it was announced.

No desire to resume running Binance

CZ admitted that being Binance’s CEO for him is in the past. He said he did not feel like going back to it, even if the US President Trump would grant him an official pardon, as it happened with Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the darknet marketplace Silk Road.

Zhao said that Binance at the moment has a quite strong team and has been run efficiently without much of his involvement over the past year and a half. CZ said that he remains a shareholder and continues to benefit from Binance’s success. He was removed from the CEO position in late 2023 over legal troubles, with Richard Teng running Binance as the CEO since then.

CZ said that he is a workaholic, works six days a week, and enjoys building new products – he is developing an educational online platform, The Giggle Academy, and is writing an autobiographical book at the moment. Still, he remains a large figure in the crypto space who a lot of people look up to, and his Bitcoin price predictions continue to send ripples across the crypto industry.