저자: CathieWood · 외국인
요약 보기
비트코인 하락 50%는 역대 가장 약한 크립토 겨울이며, 10/10 레버리지 청산·양자컴퓨팅 우려·AI 데이터센터로의 채굴 자원 전환이 하락 원인이었다. ARK는 2030년 비트코인 기본 70만 달러, 낙관 150만 달러를 전망한다. 스테이블코인은 과도기 단계이며 신흥국 사람들이 결국 비트코인을 택할 것이라 본다. 이더리움·솔라나 등 온체인 인프라와 AI 에이전트 결제 수요가 성장할 것으로 본다. 미국 스팟 비트코인 ETF 자산은 1,120억 달러를 넘었다.
다듬은 글
Even Bitcoin veterans say, “ Okay, we understand stablecoins because in emerging markets , people are barely making ends meet . They are very afraid that their currencies are destroying their purchasing power and their well-being. They can't afford the volatility of Bitcoin. So this is an intermediate stage." But they say that over time, these people will realize that Bitcoin is better than the dollar, which mostly backs stablecoins.
Er, so they will build their wealth with the help of er, bitcoin. Hello everyone, welcome to Everyday Finance. While retail investors watched a prolonged downturn last year and feared the end of the crypto market’s 4- year cycle , large institutional asset managers were quietly rebuilding financial infrastructure on public blockchains .
This fundamental disconnect between retail investor anxiety over pricing and the development of institutional infrastructure underpins an optimistic market outlook that includes the views of ARK Invest CEO Katie Wood and Franklin Templeton’s Sandy Coll. Wood argues that despite the general pessimism of retail investors, the recent market downturn is actually the mildest cryptowinter in history, preparing Bitcoin for price levels that most investors find incredible.
At the same time, Call demonstrates how Wall Street giants managing trillions in assets are actively implementing operational on-chain products, including funds managed entirely by smart contracts on public blockchains without traditional paper transfer agents, with clear regulatory approval. By analyzing why retail investors’ fears are largely unfounded, alongside Wall Street’s accelerated efforts towards tokenization, this analysis shows that institutional adoption and integration of blockchain is advancing at an unprecedented pace, regardless of short-term fluctuations in schedules.
bullish, optimistic. So, over the past year, we have gone through another cryptowinter. But we fell, at least in relation to Bitcoin, by 50%. In previous crypto winters, Bitcoin fell by 75-95%. Some progress. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. But the reason for this winter is, firstly, the so-called “flash crash” on October 10 last year on Binance, when a software failure occurred and the so-called auto-deleveraging occurred, when a hedge fund or DeFi company operated on two exchanges, on one of which they had a “ long” position and on the other a “short” one, in order to be perfectly hedged.
A software glitch occurred during the automatic leverage withdrawal on Binance , causing this liquidation. So, they ended up at a complete disadvantage. And I think it cost— depending on the estimates— between $15 billion and $30 billion in damages. Many people simply went bankrupt. So that was the first one.
The second is quantum computing. Quantum computing: Many believe that the most attractive target is Bitcoin. And the reason is that it is cryptography, and Satoshi coins are there . We don't know if Satoshi is a group or a single person, but this entity hasn't moved these coins since their creation.
So they are easy prey. They haven't moved their wallets to more quantum-resistant systems. And of course, there are many lost Bitcoins. This is a big and attractive goal. The more we work on quantum technologies, the more we realize that it will take years and years. AI research is currently accelerating progress, but not that significantly.
To give you an idea: they are currently working with 100 qubits simultaneously. This is the maximum. We need hundreds of thousands of qubits to crack the code, so to speak. This will happen very soon. And the third event was the development of AI. AI was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, and Bitcoin miners were at the forefront.
They switched from mining Bitcoin to powering data centers , right? So, these three things happened over the past year. I think we've hit rock bottom. We went from 60,000, just below that level, to around 80,000. We still believe that Bitcoin is three revolutions in one. First, he introduced the technology inherent in the Internet and the currency inherent in the Internet, which we did not have.
Why did n't we have it before? It did n't exist because in the early 90s, when Internet developers were writing code, no one knew that financial services and commerce would move online. So, there was no built-in level for that. Now it is , so this technological revolution is a global monetary system.
So, first: digital, private, unregulated, rules-based, and crucially, mathematically capped at 21 million units, guaranteeing long-term purchasing power and wealth creation in a way that fiat currencies do not. And the third is a new asset class. This is really the first representative of a new asset class, and we think it will become the biggest, because these are three very big ideas.
Very big ideas. We publicly forecast the base scenario at 700,000, the optimistic one at 1.5 million, but when, until when? Well, we called it 2030 . This could well happen, especially if institutions enter the market en masse. And tokenization as a concept is attracting more and more institutions to decentralized finance.
The only thing that has slightly dulled Bitcoin's shine from a fundamentals perspective is stablecoins. And yet, if you're a Bitcoin veteran, you have it here. Veteran? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, great. Yes, yes. Good. By the way, the first time I heard this was when I was recording a podcast, Tasha and I were doing a podcast with Elon Musk.
He used the word "OG" and I looked at Tasha: what is that? So now I'm an expert. Whatever. So even Bitcoin veterans say, " Okay, we understand stablecoins because in emerging markets , people are living paycheck to paycheck." They are so worried that their currencies are destroying their purchasing power and their wealth.
They can't afford the volatility of Bitcoin. So this is a temporary step. But they say that over time, these people will realize that Bitcoin is better than the dollar, which mostly backs stablecoins. So they will build their fortunes with Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin has suffered a stunning 50% drop from its October 2025 peak of nearly $126,000, macro analysis suggests this is the mildest winter in the asset's history as its expanded institutional base has consistently reduced historical volatility.
This decline was caused by the confluence of three specific pressures, rather than a fundamental failure. An unprecedented 10/10 leverage rollout on October 10, 2025, when over $19 billion in leverage positions from 1.6 million traders were liquidated amid the US-China trade war, unfounded short-term fears about the threats of quantum computing, and the temporary redirection of capital and mining infrastructure to AI data centers.
Ultimately, as Ark Invest CEO Katie Wood emphasizes, this mild cyclical contraction simply reflects a market maturing, deleveraging, and preparing for the next major expansion phase once broader macroeconomic headwinds subside. We do that. We believe that the "big four" are Bitcoin , Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid.
And during a bear market, developers really build. And we watch what they build and see how ecosystems adapt to each other and become more specialized. Hyperliquid is all about perpetual futures. Solana also has high financial transaction throughput. Ethereum is all kinds of smart contracts . I think this will be very important for agency commerce.
But as we learn from companies like Cloudflare, Cloudflare says: to enable agent commerce and agent payments, we will need an ecosystem, a blockchain, that allows for 20 to 100 million transactions per second. So these are microtransactions, where agents communicate with each other and make deals in micro, you know, micro denominations, right?
That is, 1/1000, 1/1,000,000 of a dollar, something like that. So, Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, says we need between 20 million and 100 million. Well, we see that Visa, the traditional payment ecosystem, is doing 20,000 payments per second. Think about this. He says 20-100 million. Ethereum and Solana have very low throughput.
I'm an advisor at a blockchain called Layer Zero, and they're targeting 2 million and planning to increase that later. So we're watching the payments space, agent payments, agent commerce , to understand how quickly it will evolve and scale. And I think it's going to be really important for Ethereum in particular to see if it can handle that kind of volume.
He ca n't now. This is when founders get very inventive. The increase in rates, the rates increased 22 or 24 times. This has never happened before, and it has exacerbated supply chain problems. We can usually withstand rate increases. Rapidly increasing rates is much more complicated. I mean, the "magic six" did pretty well.
It's harder to go through something like this. I do n't think we'll see that again. First, I hope COVID does n't happen again. But even if it happens again, the reason for such a sharp increase in rates was that governments around the world simultaneously threw all their forces at it—both from a fiscal and monetary perspective, and that caused a lot of problems.
They probably won't do it again. We believe we are in the early stages of the artificial intelligence revolution. I'm really glad that many people are talking about the hype around AI. Doesn't this look like a bubble of technology and telecommunications companies? Won't this end badly? As is usually the case, such things often end badly because too much capital is chased after a single opportunity, and this reduces the return on investment.
We have n't even come close to that yet. If you look at the annual revenue growth of Anthropic—we own a stake in our venture fund— their revenue went from $9 billion in December to $65 billion in 6 months. So, in 7 months, Anthropic has generated as much revenue as Salesforce — and I understand we're in the Salesforce building — has generated in its entire 25-year history.
And what we learn—it's just a rumor, I think the FT wrote about it, I do n't remember exactly, but we consider them to be reasonable: Anthropic's gross margin is 80%, and the company has been profitable for two consecutive quarters from an operating perspective. Of course, she's preparing for an IPO, so I'm sure she wants to look her best, and that's part of what's going on.
But, you know, besides Anthropic, look at what happened with SpaceX's xAI. They built data centers, then decided...well, first, SpaceX bought the company and decided to reorganize it because it was lagging far behind the big, cutting-edge language models . They reorganized, and, you know, the skeptics said, "Yeah, he just bought it because it was losing so much money, and he wanted to hide it within this much bigger company." They have the last laugh.
What happened: he turned around and, having built a data center for the equivalent of ( estimates vary, but between $25 billion and $30 billion per gigawatt), he turned around because he was n't using it anymore, and sold it to, I think , Anthropic. Yes, it was Anthropic. He turned around and sold it for $34 billion per gigawatt, even though it was worth less.
So, you get, you know, over 100% return on your investment in the first year. And then Google came along and paid $50 billion per gigawatt. So we're in such early stages, the demand is so huge, the profits are so huge. This is a pretty provocative technology, and I gave you a bunch of examples from the perspective of embodied AI, how it's not just about productivity in companies and organizations.
This in itself is a very big opportunity. This is autonomous mobility of all kinds, not just robo-taxis, but also drones, trucks, air taxis, etc. So we live in a world of true transformation. And I think there are a lot of people who are the " elders" of the industry today. They experienced the boom and bust of the technology and telecommunications markets early in their careers.
And they are essentially saying, "we've been through this before, we won't do it again." I am the leader of this firm or whatever . I went through this. I understand what they are saying. You know, it was a crazy period. And it feels just as crazy, or felt just as crazy as all of this right now. But this is the real deal.
The seeds were sown back then. It just wasn't ready to sprout and bloom. They were born over a period of 25 years. Cloud technologies only appeared in 2006. The first major breakthrough in AI didn't happen until 2012—it was deep learning. The second big breakthrough was the transformer architecture in 2017.
Large language models. It took us almost 20 years to do all this. And now we are ready to start. Think about this. What I just described is 25 years of stretching a rubber band. Ark Invest's long-term forecasts estimate the base value of Bitcoin at around $700,000, and an optimistic one at $1.5 million by 2030.
This forecast is supported by a steady inflow of institutional capital, as assets in US spot Bitcoin ETFs have exceeded $112 billion. The main driver was the BlackRock fund, which has raised about $55 billion since its launch in early 2024, with daily net inflows of more than $700 million. In addition to Bitcoin, Katie Wood's forecast highlights a group of assets driving the crypto market: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and highly liquid assets, emphasizing Ethereum's role as a core settlement layer for institutional adoption.
This thesis is supported by accumulation by corporate treasuries, exemplified by Bitmain, which holds nearly 6 million ETH worth about $17 billion, approaching 5% of the total supply , as well as rising inflows into the Ethereum spot ETF, even as Wood acknowledges the structural and market challenges facing the asset.
Comments 0