Cryptocurrencies could be worth ‘trillions of dollars,’ top VC says

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Partner Albert Wenger presents during USV Annual Meeting 2017 on November 2, 2017 in New York City.

Cryptocurrencies have a high chance of being worth trillions of dollars in the future, according to one top venture capitalist.

Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in several blockchain start-ups, said there is “irrational exuberance” in the cryptocurrency market, but in the long term, the value of these digital coins could go higher.

“So I believe there’s a good chance that cryptocurrencies taken together as a bucket will be worth trillions of dollars. We are a long way from that,” Wenger told CNBC in an interview on Thursday.

Bitcoin smashed through the $11,000 mark this week before seeing a pull back. Cryptocurrencies are known for being volatile with huge price swings daily.

Speaking to CNBC at the Slush technology conference in Helisnki, Finland, Wenger said it’s too early to tell if cryptocurrencies are in a bubble. But he referenced Amazon’s share price since its initial public offering (IPO) in 1997, and said a stock chart over the last 20 years is an upward curve.

While Amazon had some steep drops in share price in the early days, the overall share price has risen since it went public.

“If you look at (the) Amazon stock chart, it looks like this massive upward sloping curve. But then if you zoom in you see in the beginning there was this very quick run up and then this big drop off. So the way I look at this (cryptocurrencies) is when we look back at it from far in the future, it will be a very massive run up. The current run up could turn out to be a blip on that chart,” Wenger said.

“So I think it’s you know, once you reach the territory we are in today, there’s definitely a way for it to go down. And there’s definitely also a path in the future where, cryptocurrency as a whole will be worth trillions of dollars.”