Bitwise Targets Bitcoin at $1.3 Million, Driven by Institutions

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. A year after presenting the same figure in a detailed report, Bitwise is back at the table. This time, its Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan takes the lead, focusing on a single lever: the still nascent appetite of large financial institutions for Bitcoin. Key points of this article:

• Bitwise reiterated its prediction that a 1% allocation of the assets of large financial institutions to Bitcoin could propel it to $1.3 million by 2035.
• The scenario is based on the assumption of massive adoption by institutional investors and the impact of spot ETFs to facilitate this access.

Hougan's calculation hinges on one hypothesis. If institutional investors, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and insurance companies, which manage between $100 trillion and $200 trillion in assets globally, allocated just 1% of these sums to Bitcoin, the demand shock would be enough to drive the price to $1.3 million by 2035, reports CoinDesk. Spot ETFs, by simplifying access for these large portfolios, play a crucial role in this influx.

The other pillar of the reasoning relies on the position Bitcoin could occupy in the broader market of value reserves, currently dominated by gold and real estate. Hougan bets on capturing a quarter of this market within a decade, provided it continues to grow at its historical rate of 13% per year. A quarter of a growing pie each year would, in his view, justify the target price.

This forecasting exercise remains a bet, not a certainty.

Bitwise is not new to this topic. Back in August 2025, the company was already projecting the same $1.3 million horizon, with an optimistic scenario nearing $3 million and a pessimistic one below $90,000. The range is wide, and this is precisely the problem with such exercises; a model that can aim for both $90,000 and $3 million primarily reveals the extent of uncertainty surrounding the central variable: the actual pace of institutional adoption.

This bet on institutions is not isolated in the field. Other analysis firms present equally bold figures over varying time horizons, with methodologies that differ significantly from one firm to another. The Fed, for its part, reminded this week that it does not consider Bitcoin as an asset it would intervene to save in the event of a crash, a reminder that contrasts with the institutional optimism displayed by Bitwise.

One point deserves to be made clear: 1% of $100 trillion already represents $1 trillion in incoming flows, nearly half of Bitcoin's current total market capitalization. Such an influx, even spread over ten years, would far exceed what ETFs have captured since their launch in the United States. The programmed scarcity of the asset, capped at 21 million units, mechanically favors the bullish scenario, provided institutional demand truly follows this pace throughout the decade, and not just during the time of an optimistic report.