Cathie Wood of Ark Invest Predicts Bitcoin Will Reach $1 Million by 2030 – Here’s Why

Ark Investment founder and CEO Cathie Wood believes Bitcoin could top $1 million per coin by 2030. 

The famed stock-picker is standing by her bold prediction that each BTC coin would be worth $1 million in the next eight years despite the recent bloodbath in the market that has seen the flagship cryptocurrency plunge to a record low in two years. 

“Yes — you know, sometimes you need to battle tests, you need to go through crises to see the survivors first of all but really to battle test the infrastructure and the thesis,” she told Bloomberg on Wednesday. “And again we think bitcoin is coming out of this smelling like a rose.”

Wood noted that the recent market meltdown might scare off institutional investors for some time, who may take more time to try to understand the technology and how Bitcoin works. But when they do their research, they will come back even stronger, she said. 

“Once they actually do the homework and see what’s happened here, I think they might be more comfortable moving into Bitcoin and perhaps Ether as a first stop because they’ll understand it more,” she added.

Notably, in January, ARK analyst Yassine Elmandjra wrote in the firm’s “Big Ideas 2022” outlook report that Bitcoin’s price could exceed $500,000 by 2026. Elmandjra argued that Bitcoin adoption would find momentum as more nations adopt the coin as legal tender.

Wood Says FTX Collapsed Because of “Fraud”

The prominent investor also touched on the recent fallout of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, saying that it failed due to “fraud.” However, she insisted that the FTX saga is nothing on the scale of Lehman Brothers or even Bernie Madoff.

“Put a little perspective into the situation here — the entire crypto asset ecosystem is an $US800 billion ecosystem. Apple is three times larger in terms of market cap,” she said.

“Many people are saying, is this another Lehman, could we see a domino effect here? The banking system back in 2008-09 [was] trillions and trillions of dollars. Right now it seems FTX [owes] $US5-10 billion to creditors. Lehman was $US1.2 trillion in claims. Madoff was $US64 billion in claims.”

Nevertheless, Wood said that the underlying blockchain technology is solid despite the collapse of some high-profile crypto companies since the start of the year. 

“If you look at the Bitcoin blockchain and Ethereum, what you’ll find is the infrastructure, the technology, has not skipped a beat throughout this entire crisis,” 

Indeed, on-chain data from Glassnode shows that users are withdrawing their funds from centralized exchanges into self-custody wallets following the collapse of FTX, showing confidence in the underlying technology.