A third of Americans will buy Bitcoin by the end of 2022, according to Ric Edelman

The future is bright for Bitcoin, according to Ric Edelman, founder of financial advisory firm Edelman Financial Engines.

Bitcoin ( BTC ) bull and Edelman Financial Engines founder Ric Edelman has made some promising predictions about the future of the seminal cryptocurrency.

In an interview on CNBC's ETF Edge show on Monday, Edelman said :

"We're already at a quarter of that number, with 24% of Americans owning Bitcoin. It won't be that hard to get to a third. Bitcoin is getting more and more popular. People hear about it everywhere: no It is going away".

Although 2022 has had a rocky start, in his opinion, governments, companies, foundations, and pension funds are investing in Bitcoin: "There is a large institutional participation."

As the author of the forthcoming The Truth About Crypto, Edelman is a longtime advocate of cryptocurrency development. In 2019, he described Bitcoin as the first "genuinely new asset class" in 150 years, and as early as December 2018, he recommended investors stock up on the orange coin.

In a follow-up interview with CNBC on Tuesday, he lamented that although he has predicted a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) for the past seven years, he is convinced that by 2023 there will be the approval of a spot ETF.

Like Hester Peirce, Commissioner of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Edelman believes that the SEC is running out of excuses to say no:

"A lot of the SEC's concerns have been resolved by the industry through its own maturity, innovation and development. I'm sure we'll see the SEC say yes because there's no legitimate reason for it not to."

Matthew Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, agreed with him in the second interview.

Hougan said there would be even more protections for investors and a better product thanks to the "cumulative weight of evidence that will force them to give approval." The consumer protection offered by an SEC-managed ETF is the icing on the cake of a quality product.

ETF speculation aside, Edelman is prescient about the banality of Satoshi Nakamoto's invention of the future . He succinctly summed it up by saying that Bitcoin “is going to be as common in the next couple of years as anything else in a wallet.”