Cathie Wood - Bitcoin Will Literally Change EVERYTHING In 2026

We have not changed our bull case scenario for Bitcoin, which is above $1 million from today's levels. Today we're a little below $90,000, so that will be more than a tenfold increase. And our conviction is high because Bitcoin is three revolutions in one. It's a technology revolution really introducing currencies native to the internet, digital currencies. That is a revolution. It is also a global monetary system that is rules-based. That is a revolution. Bitcoin is mathematically metered to increase to 21 million units, and we're closing in on 20 million units right now. So we're moving to a point where I think scarcity value, as institutions move in, is going to drive the price higher.

This is a new asset class, and institutions have to consider it because the correlation of returns among crypto assets versus traditional assets is very low. And so to put Bitcoin and other digital assets into a well-diversified portfolio will increase returns per unit of risk, and that is what institutional investors are always seeking. It's been interesting to see a much more subdued cycle. We haven't seen the burst that we normally do. One of the reasons is those who have been involved in crypto and Bitcoin specifically for the last 10 to 15 years now have learned that there is this four-year cycle. Now it just so happens there's been a four-year cycle, two years after the halving, Bitcoin peaks. And so what we believe is happening is a lot of the old-timers are taking some Bitcoin off the table because they don't want to face another down cycle, which in the early days was down 90 to 95%. I think the last one at its worst was down close to 75%. Today we're down 30, 30-ish, a little over 30%. And we are beginning to think that institutions have been waiting to build positions, waiting for this four-year down cycle. And therefore, we think that the downside from here is not very significant. Just to give you a little dimension to that, if we look at where many people think the bottom will be, they think it will be around 74,000. Now why do they think that? It is because MicroStrategy, which is now called Strategy, Michael Saylor's firm, its average cost is 74,000. So technicians always look for a marker out there to define the low. We think that institutions have been studying this and that in this period where we might be between 74,000 and 86,000, we will see some movement by institutions to buy into this new asset class. And the latest evidence is that Bank of America, Merrill Lynch—so Bank of America owns Merrill Lynch—is the first company to put a spot Bitcoin ETF on its platform. And what that means is Bank of America's clients were not allowed to build positions in Bitcoin. Well, a few weeks ago, they allowed it. And as they have been educating investors about Bitcoin, they have been informing them about this four-year cycle. So, we think that institutions are going to pick up the slack here and that we will not have a down round like the 75% we saw in the last cycle. We do not believe Bitcoin's going to go to zero because it is a global monetary system and it is rules-based and it is good competition for fiat currencies, especially in emerging markets. Now recently we've seen stablecoins usurp one of the roles we thought Bitcoin would play in emerging markets. So USDT, Tether, and USDC, Circle, are really on-ramps into the digital asset ecosystem and are streamlining payments. They're almost free to send. You can send very small units. And so as we've analyzed that, we thought, okay, Bitcoin is not going to be the insurance policy that stablecoins are now playing against fiat currencies. But that wasn't a huge use case for us. If we were at the extreme, our bullish case was $1.5 million. That takes about $200,000 away. So that won't take us down to zero.