Appearing on the Diary of a CEO podcast, ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood said that the “green-light” approval of spot-Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in January 2024 has only just opened the gates to what she called an “institutional land-rush” for the asset. “Institutions have barely started committing,” she told host Steven Bartlett, adding that they control “trillions of dollars” yet have access to barely “a hundred-billion-dollar sliver” of new supply because just one million bitcoin remain to be mined.
Why Cathie Wood Eyes $1.5 Million Per Bitcoin
Wood framed the supply-demand mismatch in stark macroeconomic terms. With roughly 20 million BTC already in existence, US spot ETFs alone have vacuumed up more than 1.2 million coins—about 5.7 percent of the eventual supply—since launching eighteen months ago, according to Bitbo’s on-chain ETF tracker. Daily flow data show that even on a quiet trading day, funds such as BlackRock’s IBIT and Ark-21Shares’ ARKB can collectively absorb tens of millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin, occasionally draining hundreds of coins from open markets in a single session.
“The SEC’s decision effectively legitimised bitcoin as an asset class,” Wood said, arguing that fiduciary pressure will force large wealth managers to follow early adopters. She compared the current migration to the early 1990s adoption of index funds: once one blue-chip pension moved, “others had to consider it” or risk underperforming. Pointing to her own firm’s experience—ARK first purchased GBTC at roughly $250 per coin in 2015—Wood said that scepticism from traditional finance often marks “the sweet spot” for long-horizon investors.
Wood’s long-term thesis is explicitly monetary. Quoting her mentor Arthur Laffer, she called bitcoin “the rules-based global monetary system we’ve waited for since the US closed the gold window in 1971.” Because bitcoin’s algorithmic issuance schedule is immune to fiscal or political tampering, she contends, it will attract central-bank reserves and corporate treasuries in jurisdictions where local currencies are chronically devalued by policy error. That dynamic, she argues, is accelerating: “Emerging-market savers need an insurance policy,” and for younger cohorts “digital gold” is already more intuitive than bullion.
ARK’s revised base-case model now targets $1.5 million per bitcoin by 2030—more than a fifteen-fold gain from today’s price. The three biggest “building blocks,” Wood said, are institutional portfolio allocation, millennial and Gen-Z store-of-value demand, and grassroots adoption in inflation-prone economies via stablecoin rails. None of the current projections, she noted, assume a wholesale shift of sovereign reserves, nor do they model secondary demand from bitcoin-secured lending, both of which she believes could escalate if deficits and debt service costs keep climbing.
Wood also linked bitcoin’s appeal to a broader macro backdrop of fiscal stress and waning confidence in fiat regimes. “Government spending is taxation—either now or through inflation,” she said, warning that persistent deficits threaten the dollar’s reserve-currency status and therefore heighten the allure of an apolitical ledger secured by “the largest computer network in the world.” While she acknowledged bitcoin’s volatility, Wood argued that maturation of derivatives markets and increased ETF depth are already dampening extreme price swings.
With spot bitcoin ETFs now controlling a stockpile larger than the holdings of Satoshi-era wallets, Wood contends the supply shock has only begun. “There is no mechanism to create more than 21 million coins,” she told Bartlett. “If institutions want exposure, the price will have to adjust—dramatically.” Exactly how dramatic remains the $1.5 million question, but Wood’s warning is unambiguous: the slowest movers may discover they are trying to buy what the market can no longer readily supply.
At press time, BTC traded at $107,200.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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