Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan says institutional investors will move trillions of dollars into bitcoin over the next decade, starting with financial advisers and family offices. He ties a long-term target of $1.3 million per coin by 2035 to a 1% allocation from the $100 trillion to $200 trillion in assets those institutions control. Hougan also said Strategy's rapid bitcoin buying will slow as the two funding advantages behind it fade.
Bitcoin will draw trillions of dollars from institutional investors over the next decade as financial advisers, family offices, pension plans and sovereign wealth funds come to treat it as a mainstream financial asset, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan told CoinDesk. Financial advisers and family offices will be the first professional investors to allocate at scale, he said in an email interview on Friday.
Advisers and family offices move first
Hougan pointed to 13F filings tied to spot bitcoin ETFs and to moves by large wealth firms including Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo to make bitcoin more accessible to clients as early evidence of the shift. Over time, he expects the money to widen to foundations, endowments, pension plans, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds and central banks.
According to CoinDesk: "It's a process that will take 10+ years", Hougan said. The scale involved is large: those institutions control between $100 trillion and $200 trillion in assets globally, and a 1% allocation to bitcoin would be enough to support his long-term price targets.
A price target built on gold-market math
Hougan's $1.3 million bitcoin price target by 2035 rests on bitcoin taking a 25% share of an expanding store-of-value market. Gold's market capitalization has risen from about $2 trillion when gold ETFs launched in 2004 to roughly $30 trillion today, he said. If that store of value market keeps expanding at its historical 13% annual pace for another decade, bitcoin taking a quarter of it would put each coin at $1.3 million.
Strategy's buying edge is fading
Strategy has been one of the biggest buyers of bitcoin for years, becoming the world's largest corporate holder with 842,138 BTC, even after some modest recent sales. But Hougan believes it will no longer be bitcoin's primary driver of demand. Michael Saylor's team built its buying machine by exploiting two capital-market dislocations, Hougan said: a stock premium to the value of its bitcoin holdings, and convertible debt and preferred-stock offerings that raised cash for further purchases.
Both advantages have weakened, he said, as spot ETFs offer a direct alternative that makes the premium harder to sustain, while the company has already issued as much debt as markets were willing to support against its existing capital stack. Strategy will keep buying bitcoin, Hougan said, but at a slower pace and more closely tied to the price cycle.
For long-term investors, Hougan said, the question isn't whether bitcoin has found a local bottom — it's whether the top is in.
Source: CoinDesk
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
