The Vice President of Blockchain and cryptocurrencies at IBM has said that he is bullish on Bitcoin and has made a very brave prediction on where he sees the leading cryptocurrency going. Jesse Lund recently attended the IBM Think Conference where he revealed his long-term thoughts on the Bitcoin price target in an interview with Fred Schebesta. The IBM executive pointed out that the higher the price of a crypto asset the more utility that it will have. Furthermore, he thinks that people should focus less on the moving prices of crypto assets and more on their utility. Lund said, “If the price of Bitcoin were higher, there would be more liquidity on the network, we could be having a really different discussion with banks right now.” Lund went on to add that speculators are what is wrong with the falling value of cryptocurrencies which is down to them “thinking about it wrong.” Later on in the interview, Lund went on to make a few predictions on the future of cryptocurrencies. Lund predicts that by New Year’s Eve, the price of Bitcoin will be $5,000 however the long-term outlook is a lot different. “I have a long-term outlook. […] It goes back to that discussion about the utility of the network with a higher price. I see Bitcoin at a million dollars someday. I like that number because if Bitcoin’s at a million dollars, then the satoshi is on value parity with the US penny. And that means there’s over $20 trillion of liquidity in this network. Think about $20 trillion in liquidity and how that changes things like corporate payments.” The VPs view is that when the Bitcoin price makes enough gains, serious banks will start to take more interest. When this happens, the utility of the token will also increase at its core value proposition, less expensive transfers of value. Both IBM and R3 Corda are working hard on creating solutions for cross-border payments solutions using several digital assets. Stellar IBM recently launched its World Wire Product which relies on Stellar. Lund spoke about this in detail saying: “There’s no technical reason or technical barriers that should prevent money from flowing the same way [as information]. […] The architecture of World Wire is really a cross-border payment network, the magic of which, if you will, the novelty of it, is the ability to send payment instructions saying, ‘Hey, I’m sending you something, get ready.’ And on the other end, the receiver is making sure that who you’re sending it to is not some nefarious actor or bad actor.” “Once that happens, and that happens really fast, then we send the value along with it. That transfer of value is made possible by digital instruments, settlement instruments, of which Lumens is one. So we see Lumens as a viable settlement instrument in this ecosystem of cross-border payments.”