When Cathie Wood sneezes, the crypto market catches a cold. Ask any Bitcoin maximalist how they feel watching one of the foremost architects of the digital gold thesis quietly shave $300,000 off her long-standing BTC USD price target.
You’ll get an answer somewhere between stoic and scandalized. Yet according to Ark Invest’s founder, stablecoins are quietly eating Bitcoin’s lunch. And if you take a step back, the data might just support it.
Stablecoins ‘Usurping Part of Bitcoin’s Role’
Bitcoin was always meant to be the disruptor. A currency for everyone. Permissionless, borderless, unconfiscatable, and immune to the whims of Wall Street whales.
For a time, that vision captured the hearts (and Twitter feeds) of an entire industry. But if you’ve tried sending Bitcoin for rent in Lagos or payroll in Buenos Aires, you’ll know who the real MVP is these days: stablecoins. She told CNBC:
“So our bullish forecast out there is $1.5 million by 2030. Given what’s happening to stablecoins, which are serving emerging markets in a way that we thought Bitcoin would, I think we could take maybe $300,000 off of that bullish case just for stablecoins.”
But Cathie Wood isn’t backing down from her belief in Bitcoin’s structural integrity. She’s quick to point out that the “digital gold” thesis is alive and well.
Bitcoin’s scarcity, its relentless mining schedule, and its fortress-like security remain unmatched.
Moreover, she says,
“Institutions really have just dipped their toes into this space. We have just started. So we have a long way to go.”
Big money is barely in the pool. But if you’re reading BTC USD price charts instead of Telegram channels, you might miss the new narrative. Stablecoins are serving markets that Bitcoin only ever dreamed about.
Stablecoins Are Scaling Faster
Emerging economies, where currency instability is breakfast, lunch, and dinner, are flocking to stablecoins.
USDT and USDC are flowing through remittance corridors that Bitcoin never found a practical footing in.
In just the first half of 2025, stablecoin remittances surpassed $20.2 trillion in year-to-date cross-border volume, with Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America driving record adoption rates.
Stablecoins keep on hitting new records. The stablecoin supply on Ethereum, for instance, just reached a new all-time high of ~$184.1 billion.
Lower fees, faster confirmation, and ubiquitous availability are hard to beat. As Wood sees it, up to $300,000 in upside BTC price forecast has been redirected to the stablecoin sector, simply because use cases have shifted.
It’s not that Bitcoin has failed; it’s just that stablecoins are “happening faster” and “scaling faster.”
BTC USD Price Target Still $1.2 Million by 2030
Even so, institutions remain tantalized. The “toe-dipping” Wood refers to isn’t just rhetoric. It’s visible in ETF flows, treasury management experiments, and the odd tweet from JPMorgan.
And speaking of JPM, the investment bank recently published a note tipping Bitcoin to reach $170,000 within a few months.
The fervor of perpetual contract trading is behind us, and a fresh wave of global liquidity is coming.
Analysts found the BTC price undervalued versus gold, a case not lost on anyone still holding after 2022’s apocalypse. Bitcoin, it seems, still has its place in the sun.
So, is Bitcoin being dethroned? Hardly. It may be losing some transactional relevance to nimble stablecoins, but the digital gold narrative hasn’t lost its luster (at least not from Wood’s perspective).
The question isn’t whether Bitcoin can compete with stablecoins, but whether it even needs to. Digital gold isn’t supposed to be the everyday coin you use to buy coffee; it’s the asset you keep for decades while fiat currencies tumble and burn.
Bitcoin Is a Sleeping Giant
Still, the lines are blurring. Traders are rotating into stablecoins for risk management and yield farming.
Businesses in Nigeria and Venezuela (where hyperinflation is more predictable than the weather) are transacting in Tether like it’s a local currency.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin sits quietly in cold storage, making an ever-stronger case as the “sleeping giant” in the digital asset economy.
Wood’s call to trim $300,000 off the Bitcoin price target feels more like a strategic update than a loss of faith.
She’s calling time on an outdated thesis, recalibrating her sights toward the emerging market utility and shifting liquidity flows of today’s crypto reality.
She’s not abandoning the macro case for Bitcoin itself, and as she sees it, the real story isn’t in who wins. It’s watching how institutions continue to sidestep volatility before diving in headfirst.