Wood, Novogratz Weigh $1M Bitcoin Target, Web3 Potential

Wood detailed how the top crypto asset could hit $1 million by the end of the decade. 

Wood, Novogratz Discuss Bitcoin in the U.S. 

Despite a months-long drawdown in the crypto market, Cathie Wood and Mike Novogratz are still long on Bitcoin and Web3. 

The two asset management titans sat down for a discussion at the Crypto Bahamas conference today to discuss how the future could look for Bitcoin and the broader crypto space. Both Wood and Novogratz have become known for making high conviction early bets in crypto via their firms ARK Invest and Galaxy Digital, and today they indicated that little has changed in their outlooks. 

The pair discussed how Bitcoin had increasingly become an important part of U.S. politics as it has grown. Wood said that Bitcoin had become a bipartisan issue in the U.S., and Novogratz commented on how Galaxy Digital has seen both Democrats and Republicans are starting to become more aware of the need to develop their own crypto strategies. “It comes down to politics, the political winds are shifting,” he said, before adding that SEC chair Gary Gensler would likely face increasing pressure to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF in the future. 

Wood went on to discuss ARK’s recent prediction that Bitcoin could hit $1 million by 2030. Wood explained that ARK maintains its lofty target due to Bitcoin’s potential to “usurp 50% of gold’s role,” the disruption it could cause in the global remittances market, and the likelihood of more countries and companies following the likes of El Salvador and Tesla to invest in the asset. “You’re gonna see countries putting Bitcoin into their treasury,” she said. 

Novogratz had a more pessimistic outlook, sharing a warning about the state of the U.S. economy. “There’s almost no way we get out of this debt trap without inflating out,” he said, adding that Bitcoin could surge if the U.S. fails to reign in its record inflation rates. “I’m a medium-term $500,000 guy, and it can get to $1 million at one point. But in the short term I don’t want it to,” he said. 

Web3 and NFTs 

Besides Bitcoin and the U.S. macroeconomic climate, both investors opined on Web3—the decentralized blockchain-based Internet that mostly runs on Ethereum—and the wider crypto space. They initially discussed Elon Musk’s recent Twitter buyout, with Wood stating that she thinks “we’ll see a lot of crypto permeating Twitter.” Novogratz was more skeptical of Musk’s purchase, saying that he would prefer to see decentralized versions of Twitter and Facebook. 

Wood described Web3 as “the next generation Internet,” expressing particularly strong enthusiasm for NFT technology. She said that NFTs are the first example of a “global, private, immutable, property rights system,” adding that the technology was exciting because “property rights lift people and countries out of poverty.”

Novogratz added that while the future value of the asset class and communities such as Bored Ape Yacht Club is hard to predict, adoption is “only going in one direction.” Wood also said that she thinks Web3 is likely to change the definition of asset management, with activities like lending and staking likely to play a key role in all investment portfolios, including those featuring NFTs. Staking and lending are two core DeFi activities, but they’ve become more important in the NFT space as blockchain-based assets like digital art have grown in popularity. 

Wood also indicated that she believes in DeFi by declaring that “the entire financial services sector is going to have some days of reckoning.” Nonetheless, even with the talk of Web3’s potential and a potential seven-figure Bitcoin, both investors were sharing their views on a long-term time horizon. Novogratz said that he thinks 2022 is “not the year where prices explode north,” and he’s not wrong so far. Bitcoin is currently trading just above $38,000, about 17% down year-to-date and 43% short of its November 2021 peak. Still a long way off $1 million, then. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.