Citigroup (NYSE:C) on Thursday raised its 12-month Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) target to $113,000 as Bitwise argues crypto actually won by losing the CLARITY Act.
Why Citi Turned More Bullish
Citi analysts noted that they raised their 12-month Bitcoin forecast from $82,000 to $113,000, implying roughly 35% upside from current levels.
The bank also lifted its Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) target from $2,240 to $3,028, about 12% above current prices.
Citi expects “slower but stickier” ETF inflows going forward, forecasting $5 billion over the next 12 months as advisers and brokerages gradually increase Bitcoin allocations.
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs had bled $5.8 billion in net outflows by July 13, but that trend reversed sharply, with 2026 inflows reaching $800 million by late September.
On the CLARITY Act’s Senate defeat, Citi called the SEC’s subsequent rule announcements “a temporary but meaningful positive” that softened the blow.
“At this stage of the electoral cycle, rulemaking clarity may substitute for a durable CLARITY Act,” the bank wrote, though it flagged risk that a 2028 administration change could roll back those agency rules, a concern it said sits outside its current forecast window.
The firm also pointed to the Treasury’s bond buyback program as a catalyst that revived momentum across crypto broadly.
Why Bitwise Says Crypto Won By Losing
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan wrote in a Wednesday memo that crypto rallied harder after the CLARITY Act failed than most expected.
Bitcoin is up 8% and Ethereum up 7% since the vote, while tokens like NEAR (CRYPTO: NEAR) surged 104% and Uniswap (CRYPTO: UNI) climbed 49%.
His explanation is simple: crypto gave up long-term legal certainty in exchange for faster, more aggressively pro-crypto rules from regulators.
Hougan broke down four specific winners from the bill’s collapse:
- Stablecoins — the Genius Act stays in effect and says nothing about exchanges paying rewards on stablecoin balances, letting Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) keep offering unlimited rewards with no federal cap.
- Crypto exchanges — without Clarity’s national licensing framework, Coinbase and Kraken keep their state-by-state moat against new entrants.
- Tokenization platforms — two days after the bill failed, the SEC let tokenized US stocks trade immediately through permissioned venues, skipping years of study.
- Revenue-generating tokens — the SEC clarified that announcing a buyback program doesn’t automatically make a token a security, a question Clarity’s language had left murky.
The biggest risk Hougan flags is a new administration in 2029 installing regulators who reverse course.
Even so, he argues crypto will likely be “too big to crush” by then, given how deeply major financial firms will have built on blockchain infrastructure by that point.
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