A group of analysts at Bitcoin News did something that has become strangely common in this market cycle at some point during the final week of May, when Bitcoin was uncomfortably close to $73,500 following a sharp decline from highs above $77,000. They asked artificial intelligence where all of this was going. Thirteen models. Just one prompt. A truck could pass through the range of responses they received.
By the end of 2026, Grok had the highest Bitcoin price at $145,000. With $50,000, DeepSeek was the only company at the bottom. The majority of the others clustered between $88,000 and $122,000, citing Federal Reserve policy and post-halving supply pressure as the primary factors at work. The discrepancy itself reveals something genuine about the current state of market confidence, which is why the spread is striking rather than any one figure appearing absurd.
Grok’s response was notable for more reasons than just the headline figure. It was the logic. According to the model, which presented this cycle as a convergence event, XRP and Bitcoin are rising at the same time for completely different reasons. According to Grok, Bitcoin is solidifying its position as a reserve asset, the kind that corporate treasuries and sovereign wealth funds hold because the alternative seems riskier every quarter. In contrast, XRP is a story about payment infrastructure. Real-world cross-border utility is gradually becoming more difficult to ignore, institutional capital has been unlocked by ETF approvals, and Ripple’s legal haze has cleared. According to Grok, there are two distinct theses that both succeed in the same setting.
Reading through Grok’s XRP scenarios gives the impression that the model is attempting to be both bold and cautious. The conservative XRP scenario falls between $2.70 and $4.00 if Bitcoin hits $150,000. The base case is between $5.50 and $8.00. The bullish scenario is between $9.50 and $16, depending on continued ETF inflows and regulatory momentum. These are not insignificant figures for a token that is currently trading at about $1.27, and it’s still unclear if the market structure genuinely supports that kind of move or if these projections are just borrowing from optimism with insufficient friction.
This is made more interesting by XRP’s past actions. The correlation between XRP and Bitcoin usually ranges from 0.60 to 0.85, meaning that most casual observers are unaware of how closely they move together. XRP typically declines more quickly during times of panic. It may surge more forcefully during rotations. Anyone who watched the 2021 cycle will recognize the pattern: Bitcoin ran early, altcoins followed late, and XRP experienced a compressed but dramatic surge once investors began searching for the next big thing. Whether Bitcoin stays above $100,000 long enough for rotation to begin is crucial to whether that dynamic repeats.
It’s difficult to ignore the moment’s overall strangeness. These days, thirteen AI models are being asked to forecast prices as if they were seasoned desk analysts, and their responses are circulating through cryptocurrency communities at a rapid pace. It’s reasonable to wonder if they deserve that power. These models aren’t watching ETF roadshows or reading the order books. They are asked to forecast future events in a market that consistently produces events that no historical pattern could have predicted after synthesizing patterns from historical data.
Nevertheless, the exercise shows what the current consensus structure looks like and where the fault lines are, rather than necessarily what Bitcoin or XRP will do. Grok stands well above the crowd with his $145,000 Bitcoin call. No one can say for sure whether that represents a true analytical advantage or just a more assertive set of presumptions. The structural tailwinds Grok frequently mentions—ETF inflows, rate expectations, and post-halving supply—seem to be genuine. Every day, traders are quietly debating whether they are powerful enough to push Bitcoin above its all-time high of $126,272 in October 2025 within a single year.
