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Bitwise CIO reiterates bitcoin price could reach $1 million as he compares it to gold

By Yogita Khatri

Markets•March 10, 2026, 5:03PM EDT

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Bitwise CIO reiterates bitcoin price could reach $1 million as he compares it to gold

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Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan said bitcoin could reach $1 million per coin, arguing the cryptocurrency is increasingly competing with gold as a digital store of value.

Hougan said the global store-of-value market, currently about $38 trillion, could expand significantly over the next decade.

Bitcoin would only need to capture roughly 17% of that market to reach $1 million.

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Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan reiterated that the bitcoin price could reach $1 million per coin, arguing the cryptocurrency’s long-term potential becomes clearer when viewed as a growing competitor to gold in the global store-of-value market.

In a memo published Tuesday titled “How Bitcoin Gets to $1 Million,” Hougan said investors often underestimate bitcoin’s potential because they overlook how much the store-of-value market has grown over time. He said estimating bitcoin’s value involves looking at the size of that market and calculating what share of it bitcoin could capture.

Today, the store-of-value market is just under $38 trillion, including roughly $36 trillion in gold and about $1.4 trillion in bitcoin, Hougan said. Based on that estimate, bitcoin currently represents just under 4% of the SoV market, and would need to capture more than 50% of that total to reach $1 million per coin, Hougan noted.

While the $1 million price tag for bitcoin sounds unrealistic to many investors, Hougan said the mistake many people make when evaluating bitcoin’s potential is ignoring how much the store-of-value market itself has expanded over time.

When the first gold exchange-traded fund launched in the U.S. in 2004, the entire gold market was worth roughly $2.5 trillion, Hougan wrote. Since then, the market has grown to nearly $40 trillion, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of about 13%. He attributed that growth to factors such as rising government debt, geopolitical uncertainty, and easy monetary policy.

If the store-of-value market continues growing at a similar pace, Hougan estimates it could reach about $121 trillion within the next decade.

At that size, bitcoin would only need to capture roughly 17% of the market to reach a price of $1 million per coin, Hougan said.

Hougan said recent developments in the crypto market support that possibility. A few years ago, there were no U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded funds, and institutional ownership was limited. Today, spot bitcoin ETFs have become the fastest-growing ETFs in history, and institutions such as the Harvard endowment and the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund have added exposure to the asset.GMMEME

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