ARK Invest’s new roadmap puts a big number on the table, and it’s hard to ignore. Reports say Cathie Wood’s firm’s “Big Ideas 2026” research paints a scenario where the total value of crypto climbs to about $28 trillion by 2030.
Big Ideas Point To A Shift
According to ARK and its public writeups, that $28 trillion is not blind optimism. The firm breaks the future into three main drivers: Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and tokenized real-world assets.
Reports note Bitcoin could make up roughly 70% of that total, which would mean about $16 trillion in Bitcoin market cap by 2030.
DeFi And Tokenized Assets Take The Stage
DeFi platforms and smart-contract networks are expected to grow a lot. ARK’s scenario puts smart money and on-chain services as a major contributor to market value in the run up to 2030.
The firm also projects tokenized real-world assets — things like tokenized bonds, property shares, and other financial products moved onto ledgers — to climb into the trillions, with some reports pointing toward around $11 trillion for tokenization.
How Bitcoin Fits Into The Picture
Given the share ARK assigns to Bitcoin, the math pushes toward very large per-coin prices if that scenario plays out. Reports say ARK’s base case uses a little over 20 million Bitcoins in supply by 2030 and implies a per-coin price that could sit near the high hundreds of thousands — commonly quoted numbers range up to about $950,000 to $1,000,000 in that framework.
Fast Growth Assumptions
To reach $28 trillion, the forecast depends on very steep growth each year. ARK points to an implied compound annual growth rate near 61% from present levels to 2030. That is aggressive. It would mean rapid gains across many segments of the crypto market, not just a single rally.
Reports and industry analysts warn that the path to that future has a long list of hurdles. Regulation must become clearer in many places. Institutional rails and custody tools need to expand and prove reliable.
Market sentiment has to stay positive long enough for major capital flows to arrive. Any of these things going wrong would change the numbers quickly.
ARK’s “Big Ideas 2026” details a robust vision of a $28 trillion ecosystem driven by Bitcoin, DeFi, and tokenization. Although it holds a rather ambitious 61% growth trajectory riddled with numerous regulatory and market obstacles, the vision reinforces the faith of ARK Invest in the transformation of the digital asset space from being a speculative domain to the nucleus of the global finance system.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest is leaning into a big end-of-decade call on crypto.
In its Big Ideas 2026 report published Wednesday, the firm says digital assets could reach $28 trillion in market value by 2030. That is up from about $3.13 trillion today, a jump of roughly 9x.
The firm framed the estimate around two buckets, smart contract networks and “pure-play digital currencies”, which it describes as stores of value, mediums of exchange, and units of account on public blockchains.
Ark said the market “could grow at an annual rate of ~61% to $28 trillion in 2030”.
Ark also expects Bitcoin to dominate the pie. “We believe Bitcoin could account for 70% of the market,” it said, with the rest led by smart contract networks such as Ethereum and Solana.
Image Source: Ark Invest/ Big Ideas 2026
Ark Sees Bitcoin Market Cap Climbing To $16 Trillion By 2030
Based on Ark’s forecast, Bitcoin’s market cap could rise at a compound annual growth rate of about 63% during the next five years, climbing from nearly $2 trillion to $16 trillion by 2030.
The report also argued that Bitcoin is increasingly behaving like a safe-haven asset, pointing to lower volatility and drawdowns in 2025 that looked shallow versus its own history across 5-year, 3-year, 1-year, and 3-month windows.
Institutional ownership is a big part of that story. Ark said US spot Bitcoin ETFs and public companies held about 12% of total Bitcoin supply, up from 8.7%, after Bitcoin ETF balances rose 19.7% in 2025 from about 1.12M to about 1.29M, and public company holdings jumped 73% from roughly 598,000 to about 1.09M.
Bitcoin’s maturation is showing. ARK's Big Ideas 2026 research details rising adoption, leading risk-adjusted performance, the shallowest drawdowns in its history, and more.
Smart Contract Networks Could Grow At A 54% Annual Pace
Regarding smart contracts, Ark projected that the segment could reach approximately $6 trillion by 2030, growing at a 54% annual rate, as networks generate annualized revenue of around $192B at an average take rate of 0.75%.
It also expects two to three Layer-1 platforms to take the lion’s share, with valuations driven more by monetary premium than discounted cash flows.
Ark’s report kept Ethereum in the lead when it comes to on-chain assets, saying assets on Ethereum now exceed $400B. It also said stablecoins and the top 50 tokens make up about 90% of market value across seven of the eight most popular blockchains.
Ark Sees Long Runway For Tokenization Despite Small Current Share
Ark said meme coins remain a small part of most blockchains, making up about 3% or less of capital outside Solana.
Solana is the exception, where meme coins account for about 21% of assets. The firm also said tokenization of real-world assets could be one of the fastest-growing areas, as off-chain assets offer the biggest opportunity for on-chain growth.
That tokenization thesis is where Ark put another headline number. The firm said tokenized assets could grow from $19B to $11 trillion by 2030, which would still be only about 1.38% of all financial assets, suggesting plenty of runway even in a bullish scenario.
Sovereign debt dominates tokenization today, Ark said, and it expects bank deposits and global public equities to move a bigger share of value on-chain over the next five years.
It tied broad adoption to regulatory clarity and institutional-grade infrastructure, signalling that the plumbing may matter as much as the protocols.
ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said she believes bitcoin is nearing the end of its current down cycle, arguing that the asset’s latest four-year drawdown will likely be the shallowest in its history.
“We’re pretty well through the down cycle here,” Wood said in a CNBC interview, pushing back against fears that bitcoin still faces a prolonged correction. She noted that the most recent bull market was muted by historical standards, which she believes has limited the severity of the current pullback.
“I know there’s a lot of fear about the four-year cycle,” Wood said. “We didn’t have much of an upcycle by bitcoin standards, so we think we’re pretty well through the down cycle here.”
Wood acknowledged that bitcoin could continue to test key psychological levels in the near term, potentially trading within an $80,000 to $90,000 range. However, she said ARK expects those levels to hold.
“We may test in this $80,000 to $90,000 range on bitcoin, but we do think that the test will be successful,” she said.
According to Wood, the current market environment reflects a maturing asset rather than structural weakness. She described the present drawdown as “the shallowest four-year cycle decline in bitcoin’s short history,” adding that ARK expects renewed upside once the correction fully plays out.
“And then we’re off again,” she said.
Wood framed bitcoin’s long-term thesis as extending far beyond short-term price cycles, describing it as “three revolutions in one”: a new global, rules-based monetary system competing with fiat currencies, a breakthrough technology, and the leading asset in a new asset class.
“It is a technology revolution,” Wood said, “and it is the leader of a new asset class.”
Recent Bitcoin price action
Bitcoin saw a lot of intraday volatility today, swinging thousands of dollars as markets reacted to fresh geopolitical headlines from U.S. President Donald Trump.
The price surged from the $88,000 range in early morning hours to $90,500, slid back into the upper $87,000s, and then rebounded toward $90,000 following Trump’s announcement that he would delay planned tariffs.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the decision followed what he described as a “very productive meeting” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, outlining a preliminary framework for a broader deal involving Greenland and the Arctic region.
Citing the talks, Trump said tariffs scheduled to take effect on February 1 would not be imposed, easing near-term trade concerns and helping lift risk assets, including bitcoin, back toward key psychological levels.
Cathie Wood is arguing that the next phase of US policy and macro could recreate an early-1980s style risk-on regime, one that, in her telling, strengthens the case for bitcoin as a portfolio diversifier even as it complicates the “digital gold” narrative. In a post on X, the ARK Invest CEO said “the next three years could be Reaganomics on steroids,” pointing to deregulation, tax cuts, “sound monetary policy,” and “peace through strength” as ingredients for a stronger dollar and capped gold prices.
Her January 15 “New Year letter,” titled Cathie Wood’s 2026 Outlook: The US Economy Is A Coiled Spring, lays out the mechanics behind that analogy and places crypto explicitly inside the policy and productivity story.
A “Coiled Spring” Macro Thesis
Wood’s central claim is that the US has looked sturdier than it really is because weakness has rotated through rate-sensitive pockets rather than hitting the whole economy at once.
“Despite sustained real gross domestic product (GDP) growth during the past three years, the underlying US economy has suffered a rolling recession and has evolved into a coiled spring that could bounce back powerfully during the next few years. In response to COVID-related supply shocks, the record-breaking 22-fold surge in the Fed funds rate from 0.25% in March 2022 to 5.5% in the sixteen months ended July 2023 pushed housing, manufacturing, non-AI capital spending, and low-to-middle income America into recession.”
She anchors the housing leg with a specific trough: existing home sales fell 40% from a 5.9 million annual rate in January 2021 to 3.5 million in October 2023, which she notes is “a level last seen in November 2010.”
From there, Wood pivots to policy impulse and cash-flow relief. “Thanks to the confluence of deregulation and lower taxes (including tariffs), inflation, and interest rates, the rolling recession which has characterized the last few years in the US could turn quickly and sharply during the next year and beyond. Deregulation is unleashing innovation in every sector, led by the first AI and Crypto Czar, David Sacks, in the AI and digital assets space. Meanwhile, lower taxes on tips, overtime, and social security should hand US consumers significant refunds this quarter, potentially driving real disposable income growth up from ~2% at an annual rate during the second half of 2025 to ~8.3% this quarter.”
She also argues corporate cash flows could be boosted by accelerated depreciation, writing that it could push the effective corporate tax rate “down toward 10%,” with 100% first-year depreciation for equipment, software and domestic R&D made permanent and retroactive to January 1, 2025.
Gold, Bitcoin, And The Dollar
Wood’s inflation case is concrete and component-driven. She points to oil falling from about $124 on March 8, 2022 to a level that’s roughly 53% lower, and down about 22% year-over-year as of ARK’s January 12 data cut. She adds that single-family home sale prices are down about 15% from the October 2022 peak, while existing home price inflation (three-month moving average) decelerated from roughly 24% YoY in June 2021 to about 1.3%.
On labor, she cites non-farm productivity up 1.9% YoY (third quarter), compensation per man-hour up 3.2%, and unit labor cost inflation at 1.2%. She then pushes a real-time check: Truflation at 1.7% YoY as of January 7, nearly 100 bps below CPI-based inflation.
The crypto hook comes through her attempt to split gold’s recent run from bitcoin’s role in portfolios. “During 2025, the gold price appreciated 65% as the price of bitcoin slipped 6%. While many observers have attributed the 166% surge in the gold price from $1,600 to $4,300 since the end of the US equity bear market in October 2022 to the risk of inflation, another interpretation is that global wealth creation… has outpaced the ~1.8% annualized increase in the gold supply globally.”
Wood then leans on supply schedules and correlations. She notes bitcoin’s supply is “mathematically metered” to rise about 0.82% per year for the next two years before slowing to ~0.41%, and argues that diversification — not “digital gold” rhetoric — is the cleaner allocator lens. In ARK’s correlation matrix using weekly returns from 1/1/2020 through 1/6/2026, bitcoin’s correlation is 0.14 to gold, 0.06 to bonds, and 0.28 to the S&P 500; the S&P 500–bonds correlation is shown at 0.27.
Finally, she brings it back to FX: after a year in which the trade-weighted dollar (DXY) fell 11% in the first half and 9% for the full year, Wood argues that higher US returns on invested capital, driven by fiscal, deregulation, and US-led technological breakthroughs, could push the dollar higher, echoing the early Reagan period when “the dollar nearly doubled.”
If Wood’s “Reaganomics on steroids” framing gains traction, the near-term market implication is less about a single bitcoin price target and more about positioning: a regime she expects to feature falling inflation, lower rates, and heavy AI capex (data-center systems investment up 47% to nearly $500 billion in 2025, with a further 20% to roughly $600 billion expected in 2026) is one where allocators may revisit where bitcoin sits on the risk spectrum, and whether its low cross-asset correlation is the more durable thesis than any one-line comparison to gold.
While Wood’s 2026 outlook does not publish a specific Bitcoin price target, ARK has previously outlined 2030 scenarios for BTC of roughly $300,000 (bear), $710,000 (base), and $1.2 million (bull).
Cathie Wood is betting that politics, not just markets, could be the catalyst that pushes the United States into actively buying bitcoin.
The ARK Invest founder said this week that cryptocurrency has become a durable political issue for President Donald Trump, one that could shape policy decisions as the White House looks ahead to the 2026 midterm elections.
In Wood’s view, that dynamic increases the odds that the federal government eventually moves beyond holding seized BTC and begins purchasing BTC outright for a national strategic reserve.
Crypto was “part of the reason he won the presidency,” Wood said on a recent episode of ARK’s Bitcoin Brainstorm podcast. With midterms looming, she argued, Trump has incentives to keep the industry onside and to deliver visible progress.
“The most important one is that he doesn’t want to be a lame duck. He wants to have another one or two productive years, and I think he sees crypto as a path to the future,” Wood said.
The U.S. BTC reserve was created by executive order less than a week into Trump’s second term, alongside a broader digital asset stockpile and a new interagency working group chaired by Special Advisor for AI and Crypto David Sacks.
So far, however, the reserve has been capitalized only with bitcoin seized through criminal forfeitures — assets Trump has pledged not to sell.
“It seems as though there has been reticence about actually buying bitcoin for the strategic reserve,” Wood said. “So far, it’s confiscated [bitcoin].” That posture, she suggested, may not last. “The original intent was to own one million bitcoins, so I actually think they will start buying.”
Crypto has emerged as a more organized political constituency over the past election cycle. Industry-backed political action committees poured money into congressional races, while prominent executives publicly endorsed Trump and, in some cases, donated personally. Wood herself was among those supporters.
The administration has also made a point of signaling engagement with the sector. The White House has hosted crypto-related events, and firms including Coinbase, Tether and Ripple are among those contributing to the construction of a new White House ballroom.
Bitcoin as a ‘scarce value’
On the policy front, Trump has signed executive orders establishing the bitcoin reserve and crypto stockpile, and backed legislative efforts such as the GENIUS Act, which would formalize stablecoin rules.
A July report from Sacks’ working group laid out additional recommendations, including granting the Commodity Futures Trading Commission authority over spot markets in non-security digital assets. It reaffirmed that the bitcoin reserve and crypto stockpile would be administered by the Treasury Department and, at least initially, funded with forfeited assets. The order also directed the Treasury and Commerce Departments to explore “budget-neutral” ways to acquire additional bitcoin.
Wood sees that constraint as the key hurdle, but not an insurmountable one. She framed potential government buying as a market inflection point, especially as bitcoin’s supply tightens. Nearly 20 million of bitcoin’s 21 million cap have already been mined.
“If we get the U.S. not just adding confiscated bitcoin to a strategic reserve but actually out there buying,” Wood said, “that would set off what we’re all waiting for — the scarcity value to reassert itself.”
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