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Ripple's Bold Bet: $180K Bitcoin by New Year's 2026 – Garlinghouse's Epic Call Ignites Crypto Fireworks

Ripple​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ CEO Brad Garlinghouse was at it again. He made a shocking prediction of Bitcoin hitting $180,000 by the end of 2026, during Binance Blockchain Week in Dubai on December 3, 2025. Garlinghouse was sitting on a discussion panel with Solana Foundation President Lily Liu and Binance CEO Richard Teng, and he couldn't keep his optimism under wraps. He called 2026 the "most bullish year for crypto ever". He also sees recent volatility as just a "healthy correction" that sets the stage for BTC to go to the moon again, as BTC is trading around $93,000 after a 26% drop from $126,000.

Garlinghouse backed his prediction with the arrival of three major environmental factors: First one being a U.S. regulatory environment under pro-crypto policies which will, according to Garlinghouse, allow institutional capital that's been sitting on the sidelines for a while to flood the market. Second driver is the rapidly growing use of crypto ETFs, which could take up just 1-2% of the global ETF market worth $100 trillion, and third factor is the increasing number of real-world use cases, such as asset tokenization. He even named some of Wall Street veteran firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity as "structural participants" who are now actively engaging with crypto and not just riding on the speculative hype, while stressing how the US turning from antagonism to love-constituting 22% of the world's GDP-is a game-changing tailwind.

Other panel members were equally bullish but with some differences: Liu forecasted BTC above $100,000 but without giving any definite timeline. On the other hand, Teng was non-committal to the specifics and chose to emphasize the importance of long-term fundamentals instead. This is not Garlinghouse's first time to make such a prediction. In a few interviews such as Fox News conducted in April and June 2025, he notoriously suggested that $200,000 at the end of 2025 was "not unreasonable", connecting the dots from policy changes to his prediction. His outlook is that as ETF inflows pick up and whales continue to buy, which is what we are witnessing now, the market will have matured to the point where breaking the ceiling will be the next logical ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌step.

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