Bitwise's Hougan Says Bitcoin Could Reach 25% of Gold's Market by 2035

Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan has put a figure on how far bitcoin could travel against gold. In an interview with the crypto channel VirtualBacon, written up on 14 September, Hougan said it was "reasonable to say" bitcoin could grow to 25% of the gold market by 2035. The number is not new for him. It is the base case of a valuation model he described to CoinDesk in an email interview on 8 August, and the same quarter-share sits behind the $1.3 million price target Bitwise attaches to that year. Bitcoin is nowhere near it today.

What the model assumes

Hougan's frame treats bitcoin as a competitor for what the industry calls the store-of-value market, meaning money parked in assets bought to hold, not to spend. Gold is most of that pool. He told CoinDesk that gold's market capitalization grew from roughly $2 trillion when the first gold exchange-traded funds launched in 2004 to about $30 trillion now, a pace near 13% a year. Carry that growth forward another decade, hand bitcoin a quarter of the result, divide by the coins that will exist, and the arithmetic lands near $1.3 million a coin.

"When people value bitcoin, they often talk about it as competing with gold for the 'store of value' market," Hougan told CoinDesk in August.

The 25% is the middle of three cases. Hokanews, writing up the VirtualBacon conversation on 14 September, put the bear case at 2% and the bull case at 50%.

Where bitcoin stands against gold now

Coinbase's price page showed bitcoin at $76,545 on 17 September, with a market capitalization of about $1.54 trillion. Against a gold market near $30 trillion, that is a little over 5%. A quarter of gold asks for a fivefold move in the ratio, not in the price alone, because gold is assumed to keep growing through the same decade. A conference slide covered here last week put bitcoin at 1% of global money, the same exercise run against a wider denominator.

The two targets rest on different bases

Two Hougan numbers circulate together and they are not measured the same way. In the August interview he said gold is a $30 trillion asset and that half of it would make a coin worth $715,000, a figure drawn on the gold market as it stands. The $1.3 million figure is a quarter of a store-of-value market Bitwise expects to be much larger by 2035. Hokanews gave that future market as $91.5 trillion, up from $29.4 trillion, and the price as $1,306,740; CoinDesk and CoinMarketCap carried the rounded $1.3 million and the 13% growth rate without an endpoint. A quarter of $91.5 trillion spread across bitcoin's supply does not produce $1,306,740, and we could not establish which figure supersedes the other.

The share and the date themselves hold up. Both appear in CoinDesk's 8 August account of the model and in CoinMarketCap's write-up of it. The VirtualBacon interview is thinner ground: one outlet carried it on 14 September, crediting CoinMarketCap, and no second report of that conversation could be found by publication time. The venue is reported, not confirmed.

Who is supposed to buy it

Hougan's answer to how the share gets filled is institutional money. He told CoinDesk that institutions hold most of the money in the world, and that crypto's move from $2 trillion to $20 trillion would be led by them rather than by the retail buyers who built the first $2 trillion. He put global institutional assets at $100 trillion to $200 trillion and said a 1% allocation would carry his long-term targets. He also called it a process that will take 10+ years.

Some of that flow is already countable. BlackRock's IBIT topped 784,000 BTC this month, though two trackers gave two counts of it. The 2035 date is doing the heavy lifting in all of this, and nothing about it can be tested before it arrives. The nearer test is the flow. If institutional allocations stall over the next year or two, a quarter of gold becomes a steeper climb from a lower base than the model starts with.