KEY POINTS
- 'Bitcoin is the equivalent of digital gold,' says Wood
- ARK's Wood recently said that Bitcoin is backed by the largest computer network in the world
- At 11:13 a.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, Bitcoin was trading at a price of $41,640.91
Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of the investment management firm ARK Invest, has conveyed her optimistic perspective on Bitcoin, foreseeing a bullish trajectory for the cryptocurrency.
Wood predicted that Bitcoin will not only gain a substantial foothold in Gold's market share but also reach a noteworthy trading value of $1 million per BTC in the coming years.
In a recent interview, Wood reiterated her steadfast optimism regarding Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency by market capitalization. She expressed her belief that Bitcoin holds the potential to attain a valuation of $1 million per unit at some point in the future, albeit not in the immediate term.
Furthermore, Wood predicted that Bitcoin is poised to make inroads into the trillion-dollar gold market.
Her reasoning is rooted in Bitcoin's pivotal role as a decentralized and private alternative to conventional fiat currencies.
"Bitcoin is the equivalent of digital gold, gold is an A1 trillion doll asset out there and we do believe that Bitcoin will get a nice slug of that," Wood said. She also provided an explanation of how BTC could reach $1 million per token.
"We believe that in emerging markets where monetary and fiscal policies can go wild and actually ruin purchasing power, we believe that most emerging markets are going to use something like bitcoin as an insurance policy against the confiscation of wealth," Wood said, underlining the crypto asset's broad spectrum of application.
For the ARK Invest CEO, Bitcoin symbolizes a transformative epoch in finance, representing the world's inaugural global, digital, and decentralized monetary system.
Wood's assertions stem from several key factors, including Bitcoin's inherent scarcity, robust security measures, and its increasing recognition and adoption within the investment community.
"So the scarcity value as institutions push in is going to increase the price—we think fairly dramatically," Wood noted, adding that "Right now, we're in the 40,000 to $43,000 range. It won't take much [with] institutions putting 2% to 5% of [Bitcoin] in their asset allocation, we'll get it there easily."
Last Friday, Wood reinforced her bullish stance on Bitcoin by highlighting its foundation on the world's most extensive computer network. She asserted that the Bitcoin network surpasses the collective scale of the cloud infrastructure constructed by technology giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft over the past 15 to 20 years.
"Bitcoin is backed by the largest computer network in the world, a network orders of magnitude larger than the combined size of the clouds that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have built over the last 15-20 years," Wood said in a post on X. Tech billionaire Elon Musk commented on her post, saying, "wow."
Wood's post referenced data provided by Yassine Elmandjra, the Director of Digital Assets at Ark Investment, regarding Bitcoin's hash rate reaching a historic milestone of over 500 exahashes per second in January.
Elmandjra offered a fascinating perspective on the magnitude of this achievement by stating that, for every star within our galaxy, the Bitcoin network is processing a staggering 5 billion computations per second. To put this into context, he emphasized that it would take approximately 2000 years for the entire global population, with each person performing one hash per second, to match the hash rate of the Bitcoin network.
Wow
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 19, 2024
At 11:13 a.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, Bitcoin was trading at a price of $41,640.91, accompanied by a 24-hour trading volume of $9,610,680,033.
This recent price movement reflects a modest 0.10% increase within the day but also entails a 3.09% decline over the preceding seven days.
Bitcoin's circulating supply is currently recorded at 19,604,425 BTC, while its market capitalization stands impressively at $815,377,348,930, as per data sourced from CoinMarketCap.
