Bitwise CIO Predicts Bitcoin Could Reach $30 Trillion Like Gold After ETF Approval

Bitcoin’s sitting at roughly $2 trillion right now. Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise Asset Management, thinks that number could balloon to $30 trillion — basically matching gold. And he’s not just throwing darts.

Hougan’s argument is pretty direct: look at what happened to gold after the first U.S. gold ETFs launched in 2004. Gold’s market cap climbed from around $2 trillion to approximately $30 trillion over the years that followed. Bitcoin’s spot ETFs got SEC approval on January 10, 2024, at a moment when Bitcoin’s market cap was sitting at — you guessed it — roughly $2 trillion. The parallel is almost uncomfortably clean. Hougan said it plainly: “I think it could easily do what gold did.” He’s not hedging much there. Bitcoin was trading at $82,766 at the time of the source data, so the gap between $2 trillion and $30 trillion is massive, but Hougan seems to think the trajectory is there.

ETFs, Supply, and the Long Squeeze

The ETF angle isn’t just about access — it’s about what sustained buying does to available supply over time. Hougan’s view is that current holders selling their coins can meet early ETF demand without much trouble. But if institutional buying keeps up month after month, the pool of willing sellers starts to shrink. It’s basic supply pressure, and it’s probably the most underappreciated part of the ETF story. Most of the headlines focused on inflows on day one, but Hougan’s thinking longer-term than that.

The SEC’s January 2024 approval was a genuine structural shift. Spot Bitcoin products now trade on regular stock exchanges, meaning investors get direct exposure to Bitcoin prices without ever touching a crypto wallet or managing private keys. For a lot of institutional allocators, that’s the difference between “too complicated” and “we can actually do this.” Brokerage accounts, familiar custody arrangements, standard reporting — it removes a huge chunk of the operational friction that kept big money on the sidelines.

Hougan has also floated a $1 million per Bitcoin scenario, laid out in a March memo. The math there: if the combined gold-and-Bitcoin store-of-value market reaches about $121 trillion over the next decade, Bitcoin would need to capture roughly 17% of that pool to support a price at that level. It’s a big if, and the timeline is long, but the logic isn’t crazy given where institutional interest seems to be heading.

Leverage Risk and the Patience Problem

Not everything in Hougan’s outlook is bullish cheerleading. He’s pretty direct about the risks, especially leverage. Traders using borrowed money to amplify their Bitcoin positions can get wiped out during sharp drawdowns — forced to liquidate before any recovery happens. That’s not a theoretical concern. It’s happened repeatedly in crypto markets, and it’s probably the single biggest reason retail investors underperform even in bull markets. They get shaken out right before the bounce.

See also: Bitcoin ETF Sees $244M Outflow, Ether Funds Bleed $641M in Eight Sessions

Bitwise ran a survey of 15 large institutions on this. None of them — zero — said price was a reason to exit their crypto positions. Some see Bitcoin as a store of value. Others classify it as a technology investment. The framing differs, but the conclusion is the same: they’re staying in. That’s a meaningful data point, even if the sample size is small.

Hougan’s advice for regular investors is to keep some capital in Bitcoin with a genuine 10-year horizon. He calls the potential gains “substantial and life-changing,” which is either confident or reckless depending on your risk tolerance. Probably a bit of both.

Bitcoin and Gold Moving Together

Bitwise’s own data shows Bitcoin and gold running a rolling 90-day correlation above 0.5 as of August 31 — a level the two assets haven’t hit since 2020. That’s not nothing. When two assets move together that closely, it starts to say something about how the market is classifying them. Bitcoin’s increasingly being treated as a macro hedge, not just a speculative trade.

Related: $402M ETF Outflows Threaten Bitcoins Push Toward $80K in October Rally

Institutional conversations are happening, per Hougan, but most of it stays private. The details of what major allocators are actually planning don’t show up in public filings until they have to. What Bitwise is picking up in direct conversations with large institutions sounds more bullish than what’s visible in public markets — though no specific names or commitment sizes came out of those discussions.

Existing holders, for now, aren’t selling. That’s the quiet part of the story.