The prediction is extremely bullish, but given that Bitcoin started out trading for pennies more than fifteen years ago before hitting six figures last year, a seven-figure call isn’t as crazy as it sounds. So, can Bitcoin reach $1 million?
Who Is Predicting a $1 Million Bitcoin Price?
Several of the biggest names in crypto and traditional finance expect Bitcoin to reach $1 million, and each of them works it out differently.
Michael Saylor runs Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder with 842,138 BTC on its balance sheet, and he expects the Bitcoin price to reach $1 million before this decade ends. His forecast assumes Bitcoin gains about 30% every year for the next twenty years, which would take it to $21 million a coin by 2046.
Cathie Wood, meanwhile, predicts global fund managers will eventually put 2.5% of the $200 trillion they oversee into Bitcoin. Her firm, ARK Invest, expects that money to lift Bitcoin’s market cap to $16 trillion by 2030, which works out to about $761,000 a coin. ARK’s forecasts run from $300,000 at the low end to $1.5 million at the high end.
Over on Wall Street, the research house Bernstein published its own call in 2024 and expects the Bitcoin price to reach $1 million by 2033. Lastly, Matt Hougan, who runs investments at ETF issuer Bitwise, expects it to take about ten years. He sees Bitcoin taking market share from gold along the way, since both compete for the same investors looking for somewhere to store value outside the banking system.
All of these forecasts came before Bitcoin peaked last October, and none of the analysts have changed their stance on the BTC price hitting a million despite the decline since. They expect Bitcoin to weather this drop and go on to new highs.
What Would It Take for Bitcoin to Reach $1 Million?
Matt Hougan laid out the ideal roadmap for BTC to hit seven figures in a memo he published on March 10, titled “How Bitcoin Gets to $1 Million,” and it starts with how analysts price Bitcoin in the first place. They treat BTC as a store of value, meaning something people park money in to protect it from inflation rather than spend, and gold has been the default choice for centuries.
Gold and Bitcoin together are worth just under $38 trillion today, with gold accounting for roughly $36 trillion of that, which leaves Bitcoin holding a little under 4% of the store-of-value market.
So at $1 million a coin, Bitcoin’s market cap would reach $21 trillion, or sixteen times its current $1.3 trillion. Bitcoin would have to own more than half of everything the world stores value in, and that is a stretch when it holds less than 4% today.
However, Hougan’s point is that the store-of-value market does not stay the same size. The entire gold market was worth about $2.5 trillion when the first US gold ETF launched in 2004, and it has grown roughly 13% a year every year since to reach $36 trillion.
