Edited and transcribed by Shiela Bertillo and Michael Mislos
Luis Buenaventura, Head of GCrypto and Assistant Vice President at GCash, discussed in his keynote speech on why he thinks we will be crypto rich in 2025.
- This happened at the the third edition of the Bicol Blockchain Conference (BBC 2024) last December 7, 2024, in Legazpi, Albay.
In Focus: The event featured a diverse lineup of elite speakers, including leaders, innovators, and educators in web3, blockchain, and crypto, aimed at inspiring and empowering the Bicolano tech community to drive regional and global innovation.
The following excerpt from the speech emphasized the cyclical nature of cryptocurrency markets, historical patterns, and narratives, suggesting potential Bitcoin highs in Q1 2025 but cautioning against over-reliance on past cycles to predict altcoin behavior or avoid future market dumps.
Note: The transcript has been slightly revised to maintain clarity with some parts formatted with bullet points for improved clarity and comprehension.
Discussion: Are we going to be crypto rich in 2025?
Luis Buenaventura, Head, GCrypto: The reason why we’re all here. The reason why we’re all kind of interested in learning more about this stuff.
So let’s go back to the question: Are we going to be crypto rich in 2025? What do you think? What do you guys think?
Yeah, probably. I have a strong feeling that it will happen.
Now, that is both a forecast and not financial advice. I’m supposed to say that according to our lawyers, I’m never supposed to say that what I’m teaching here on stage is financial advice, but I have a strong feeling.
However, with everything in life, there is always a strong caveat. There is a but:
Where Are We Now?
In order to fully appreciate why I think we could be rich in 2025, we should also kind of review where we are first. Where are we exactly in the grand scheme of things?
I’m going to be talking about crypto in terms of its cycles, and I hope that everyone in the audience is kind of familiar with this concept that crypto is a seasonal industry, and those seasons last four years. For everyone who’s not super familiar with this concept, we are now in the fourth cycle of crypto. That cycle is from 2024, this year, to 2027. The cycle before that was from 2020 to 2023.
What we’re going to do is compare how these cycles have worked in terms of the prices of the various cryptos we have. This is going to be a bit of a history lesson, because I’m a very firm believer that history tends to repeat itself, and that’s why we’re going to try to discuss it. We’ll go through it together.
By the way, all of my slides and presentations are always kind of handwritten and illustrated like this, because I’m trying to remove some of the intimidation factor of candlestick graphs. When you see a candlestick graph, part of your brain starts to turn off because it looks too complicated. So all of my presentations are usually like this—drawn by hand—so please forgive me if there are slight errors in the numbers. I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can, but the goal is not 100% accuracy. The goal is for you to appreciate the ideas behind this.
Reviewing Cycle 3
Cycle 3 was from 2020 to 2023.
- Bitcoin hit its all-time high at $69,000, and then, as of a couple of days back, we are now at $103,000. Actually, I was trying to check right before I got on stage. I think it’s more like: are we back at $100,000 right now? So we’re close.
- We don’t know yet what the actual highest price of this next cycle will be. All of these numbers on the right side have question marks because it seems like there might still be room to go higher than this. Again, this is the part that is not financial advice.
Now let’s look at what happened in cycle 3. A lot of you probably already sense that Bitcoin is doing very well right now. We’re clearly above its previous all-time high, but the other coins not so much.
Ethereum
- $4,800 (previous all-time high), as of this morning, I think it finally broke past $4,000 again. It’s still $800 away from going back to its all-time high. But compare that to Bitcoin, which not only hit $69,000 but exceeded it by 50% almost. So Ethereum is still lagging.
XRP
- Previously $1.80 during the 2021 cycle (with an asterisk, I’ll come back to this later).
- As of this week, $2.60—doing pretty well. It’s definitely done better than Ethereum, because Ethereum hasn’t reached its all-time high from the previous cycle. At least XRP has already kind of come back and gone a bit over.
Solana
- Went from $260 (2021) to $263 (current high this cycle). I feel like Solana probably has some ways to go. More importantly, Solana has a lot to prove because, if you all remember, Solana lost a lot of its price.
- From that $260 in 2021, it dropped all the way down to $8 or $9 before it started bouncing. So it went from $260 down to single digits before it clawed its way back up.
- Now it’s at $263 (current high), which is super impressive because most people thought Solana was going to be dead.
BNB
- Went from $690 to $780. Pretty good. I’m happy with that.
DOGE
- $0.73 was its all-time high. It’s not quite there yet because as of this week we’re at about $0.50, I think, or maybe even less than that. So it still has a way to go.
ADA
- My favorite punching bag. Went from $3 (previous cycle high) to $1.30 currently—still has some room to climb.
TRON
- $0.18 all-time high, and now it’s more than double that.
- Why did that happen? It was the banana. So Justin Sun bought a very, very expensive piece of artwork that was a banana duct-taped on top of something, and then he ate the banana. That basically went all over the world in the media. Everyone heard of this rando, super-ultra-rich crypto guy who ate a banana that was technically worth $6.2 million, and that’s why TRON is suddenly super high.
- If you think about it, it was really cheap if the price of your token doubled in value because of that. Pretty good deal, all things considered.
Extending Our Look Backward to Cycle 2
We can’t just look at two cycles; let’s go back one more cycle: Cycle 2 (2016 to 2019). This is the part where I imagine most of you were probably not into the industry yet when this was all happening, so I’ll walk you through it now.
At the time:
- Bitcoin
- Its highest peak was $20,000. That sounds like such an amazing deal right now. If Bitcoin was $20,000 right now, I’d buy the crap out of it, because I know it’s also now worth $100,000.
- Ethereum
- XRP
- Most people forgot that XRP actually hit its all-time high seven years ago, which was $3.20. The point here is that not every single crypto goes back to its all-time high or finds a new all-time high every cycle.
- XRP is one example, but if you go down the list of the top 100, you’ll find many more cryptos that hit their all-time high seven or eight years ago and have never found their way back.
This is important because there’s a temptation—especially if you’re new to crypto and you know crypto moves in cycles—to think: if I wait long enough, if I hold long enough, it will go back to its all-time high.
The data shows that’s not always true. Only some actually go back to their all-time high. In fact, if you go down the list of the top not just the top 100, but top 300 cryptos, the majority of them never go back to their all-time high.
This list, I just picked the top 8 right now. But if you really go down that list, you will see that many, many coins never go back to their all-time highs, and sometimes their all-time highs were eight years ago. So meaning, if you have bought XRP at $3.20, seven years is going to be in time for it to come back. And currently the best that you have is $2.60 again.
You know that’s not amazing, but at least it’s getting close. And again, we’re not sure if the numbers on the right column are the final numbers for this cycle. It’s possible that they will continue to go up, but it’s got a way to go.
Solana’s Emergence
- Solana did not exist in cycle 2, and yet today it’s easily in the top five by market cap. This pattern repeats: with every new cycle, new superstar coins arrive. The cycles do repeat in some ways, but also don’t repeat because of new entrants and new ideas all the time.
BNB, DOGE, ADA, Tron in Cycle 2 vs, Cycle 3
- BNB: It was double digits in that cycle and then $690 by Cycle 3—a very nice jump, still going up now.
- DOGE: The coin was $0.02 in Cycle 2 and hit $0.73 in Cycle 3—36x. Doge is one of the most visible “ridiculous stories” in the space, but you see these huge gains often.
- ADA: $1.18 to $3.09.
- Tron: It hit its all-time high in Cycle 2; in Cycle 3, it never made its way back up. Its highest price was only $0.18, so interesting that it managed to double itself recently just with the banana-eating stunt.
- I mean, that’s amazing. Universities that study digital marketing will talk about that for years to come. All it took was you to eat one very expensive banana and you were able to double the market cap of your token. That is never going to happen again and that is such a crypto thing to do.
Bitcoin vs. Altcoins: Common Narratives
One of the beliefs that we have now with crypto, in every cycle Bitcoin peaks first and then the altcoins follow.
- So Bitcoin goes up, it finds its all-time high and then very quickly after that, all of the altcoins will kind of find their own all-time highs and typically what happens is that all of those altcoins will outperform Bitcoin, meaning that if Bitcoin went 2 or 3x, the altcoins will do 10x, they’ll do 20x, some of them will do 50x.
That’s the most common narrative in this space, because we are kind of setting ourselves up, for we want to believe that the altcoins that we are betting on are all going to peak after Bitcoin has found its all-time high.
The data doesn’t actually support that. In fact, it only supported it in Cycle 2:
- In Cycle 2, Bitcoin hit $20,000 in December 2017, and by January 2018, most altcoins hit their all-time highs. For Ethereum, that was a 20x from its previous. This story originated from Cycle 2.
What Happened in Cycle 3
In Cycle 3, it didn’t happen that way. I grouped them together:
- Bitcoin, ETH, XRP all found their all-time highs in November 2021.
- BNB, Doge peaked in May 2021 (actually earlier by about six months).
- Tron peaked in April 2021, ADA in September 2021.
Now it’s very hard to give a specific reason for any of these things, but my theory is everyone already knew about the cycle 2 narrative that once Bitcoin rises, all altcoins will follow.
So what happened is they started first. This is a very common concept in trading. We call it front-running. If you assume that there is a trend that is gonna happen and you have a high conviction that it is gonna happen, what you do is you make your bet ahead of everyone else.
Why? Because that is the most maximal way that you will make money. You need to be the first. And what happened here is because everyone knew that cycle 2 was going to. But based on cycle 2, the narrative was that Bitcoin goes first, everyone else follows. People started making bets way, way earlier.
Looking Ahead to Cycle 4
So, based on Cycle 2 and Cycle 3, what can we apply to Cycle 4 (the one we’re in now)? I think it’s all going to be out of sync. Everyone has seen Cycle 2, everyone has seen Cycle 3, and now Cycle 4 will throw the old rules out the window.
Some of them might hit their peaks sooner than others. For example, maybe XRP at $2.60 is already it. This morning, I think it was settling at $2.30, so it’s dropped about 10% from $2.60.
The main takeaway: there are narratives and strong beliefs, but they’re not always supported by data. So be careful when you make portfolio decisions or decide which coins to liquidate or take profit from. Don’t assume that just because something happened four or eight years ago, it will repeat exactly. Directionally, crypto as a whole tends to go up, but which cryptos really rise is not always the same each cycle.
Strategy
What do we do with this information? We don’t know when the cycle top is. That’s the most important part. We could be at the top right now, or maybe not. I don’t believe we are.
Historical Odds
I think there’s still some space. Historically, there’s a 67% chance that Bitcoin will hit $125,000 in Q1. Where does that data come from? We looked at every time Bitcoin’s price increased by at least 50% over a two-month period. This has happened 120 times over the last 13 years. We checked how many times the price continued to go up after that. We found there is a 67% chance it will continue going up by at least 30% more. That’s how we end up at $125,000 in Q1 of 2025.
Before you start taking 100x longs on Binance, remember: 67% chance is good, but it’s not guaranteed. Still, if it’s going to continue, it will probably do so in Q1 2025.
Weakening Correlation
Another key learning is the correlation between Bitcoin’s all-time high and altcoins’ all-time highs has weakened.
Meaning that just because Bitcoin rose, it does not mean that it will attack all the other alts, and that’s super important. It’s possible that Bitcoin’s visibility and popularity will cause the other alts to find more buyers, but don’t think that just because it happened in the previous cycles, it will happen exactly the same way again.
Future Dump
Lastly—and this part isn’t great news—I think we are going to see a record-breaking dump in 2025 to 2026. I completely expect that at some point over the next year, we’ll see a headline like: “Bitcoin price loses 1 million pesos in 24 hours.” I totally believe that’s going to happen.
Why? Because 1 million pesos is not actually that big anymore if Bitcoin is at 6 million pesos. That’s an 18% drop, which is actually quite normal for crypto.
Previous Dumps: A Look at Cycle 2 and 3
Let’s look at the other dumps over the last eight years. By the way, this is the total market cap of crypto, not just Bitcoin’s price.
Cycle 2’s Big Dumps
- Early January 2018: lost 20% in a single day (January 16).
- February 5, 2018: lost 17%.
- March 29, 2018: lost 12%.
- It finally found its bottom on December 15, 2018, which was 87% down from the top.
- We had a market cap of $760 billion at the top of Cycle 2; by the end of that year, it was under $100 billion. That’s how big the drops are in crypto.
Cycle 3’s Dumps
- The drops were not as large: 11%, 12%, 13%.
- It finally found its bottom on November 9.
- The similarity is that the bottom usually ends up in Q4 of that year. For us, this could be the end of 2025—no guarantees, I have no crystal ball.
- Overall, we lost 75% of our market cap: from $3 trillion down to about $736 billion.
I’m not sharing this to scare you, but to prepare you for what might happen. This next year could be the most exciting year of your life if you’re into crypto, because you will see life-changing money—and you could potentially lose it too.
Final Words
Here are some quotes I keep in mind for long-term trading:
- “No one ever became poorer by taking profit.”
People are always so conflicted when they take profit and then the price continues to go up. If you sold your Bitcoin at $90,000, you might hate yourself because it went on to $120,000. But if you sold at $90,000, you were very likely deeply profitable. You took profit, and that’s never a bad thing.
- “The prices will stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid.”
If you go leverage short or leverage long, it doesn’t matter if the market is doing something dumb or irrational. The market can keep doing that dumb thing longer than you can hang on. Be careful with contrarian trades.
- Warren Buffett: “The market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
Sometimes the best move is just to wait. In fact, people ask me how to start with Bitcoin right now. I often say it’s not a good time to buy right now, because you’d be buying near an all-time high. So I tell them: “Set up your account on GCrypto or whatever, but don’t buy yet. Just set it up and be patient.” If you’re not a day-to-day trader, patience is often the best strategy.
Conclusion
That’s the presentation. If you found it useful or entertaining, please follow me on Facebook or Twitter. My name is Luis Buenaventura. And if you haven’t done so already, please try GCrypto. It’s in your GCash app, and you don’t have to install anything extra—it’s automatically available if you use GCash.
Thank you, everyone. Hope you found that useful.
Keep reading on BitPinas for interviews with the people who move the crypto industry in the Philippines forward.
This article is published on BitPinas: “Are We Going to Be Crypto Rich in 2025?” by Luis Buenaventura
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