The price of Bitcoin can hit $1 million in 10 years if the “store-of-value market” continues its breakneck rate of growth, according to Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan.
Like the $100,000 figure, which Bitcoin first hit in December 2024, the idea of Bitcoin trading at $1 million per coin has loomed large in the minds of proponents. That is, in part, because it would imply the market capitalisation of Bitcoin has eclipsed that of gold, the original safe-haven asset.
“This is why $1 million per Bitcoin sounds unreasonable to many, and why I dismissed it for years,” Hougan wrote in a Tuesday memo. “That is a very high bar.”
But that misses a key point about what Hougan calls store-of-value assets: their market has been growing rapidly over the past 20-plus years. And if it continues its current rate of growth, Bitcoin will only have to capture one-sixth of that market in order to surpass $1 million per coin.
Hougan only places two assets in the store-of-value category: gold and Bitcoin. The former is worth about $36 trillion. The latter is worth about $1.4 trillion, or 4% of the store-of-value market.
But gold was worth just $2.5 trillion in 2004, when the first gold ETFs launched in the US. That means it has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 13% since.
“The mistake people make when evaluating bitcoin’s potential is ignoring this growth,” Hougan wrote. “If this growth rate continues, the global “store of value” market will be ~$121 trillion in 10 years.”
If that were to happen, Bitcoin would need to capture just 17% of the store-of-value market.
Those two elements — a quickly growing market for safe-haven assets along with Bitcoin growing from one-twenty-fifth of that market to about one-sixth — are “a set of reasonably conservative assumptions,” Hougan wrote.
That likely understates the challenge: the price of Bitcoin would have to grow 14-fold, or about 1,300% in order to top $1 million.
And there are developments that could put a damper on the store-of-value market, according to Hougan.
If governments pull back from quantitative easing and reliance on relatively low interest rates to juice the economy, fear of currency debasement will recede. That could hurt the price of gold and Bitcoin, which benefit from such fear.
“But I think there’s equal risk that these projections are too conservative — that the store-of-value market will grow faster in the future, as concerns about government debt reach crisis levels, and that Bitcoin will end up taking much more than 17% of the store-of-value market in ten years,” Hougan wrote.
