ARK: Bitcoin Price to Hit $1 Million, Ether to Reach $20T Market Cap by 2030

ARK Invest has predicted via its Big Ideas 2022 Annual Research Report, that the increasing adoption and uses cases of bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and other cryptoassets could push the industry’s equity market capitalization to nearly $50 trillion by 2030, with the price of bitcoin (BTC) hitting $1 million.

A Convergence of Innovative Techs

In its 2022 annual report dubbed Big Ideas 2022: Change and Convergence, researchers at Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, a Florida-based investment management firm with over $12 billion in assets under management (AUM), detailed how innovative technologies such as blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, and DNA sequencing are rapidly evolving and converging at the same time.

In the report, the researchers noted that the convergence of application programming interfaces (APIs), social platforms, and blockchain technology could integrate businesses and consumer marketplaces while disintermediating the middlemen dominating financial ecosystems. 

The team says it expects innovation in the AI sector to trigger a nearly 10-fold increase of the industry’s current $10.5 trillion equity market cap to more than $100 trillion by 2030, while cryptoassets and digital wallets could command up to $50 trillion by the same period.

ARK says it sees a future where the evolution of blockchain technology would spur a rapid migration of money and contracts to open-source protocols that facilitate the verification of digital scarcity and proof-of-ownership.

A section of the reports reads:

“The financial ecosystem could be forced to reconfigure to take advantage of the capabilities these technologies afford, potentially leading to more transparency, fewer capital, and regulatory controls and significantly lower contract execution costs. More of everything could become money-like: fungible, liquid, quantifiable; every corporate entity and consumer will have to adapt; corporate structures might be called into question; every sector will be impacted.” 

Bitcoin to Hit $1 Million 

What’s more, the researchers further pointed out that despite bitcoin’s market cap surpassing the $1 trillion market cap threshold in 2021, the network showed no signs of breaking down, a strong indication that there is still more room for significant growth that could push the bitcoin price to $1 million per BTC by 2030.

In the same vein, the researchers have predicted that Ethereum’s market cap could exceed $20 trillion in the next 10 years, as the network continues to be the driving force of decentralized finance (DeFi), the metaverse, and more.

“According to our research, Ethereum could displace many traditional financial services, and its native token, ether, could compete as global money. As financial services move on-chain, decentralized networks are likely to take share from existing financial intermediaries. The beneficiaries of this shift include Ethereum, the base protocol, and DeFi, the decentralized applications built on top of Ethereum. As the preferred collateral in DeFi and the unit of account in NFT marketplaces, ether (ETH) has the potential to capture a portion of the $123 trillion global M2,” the firm added.

While the long-term future of bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) may look quite bright going by ARK’s forecasts, the present reality is that the price of bitcoin is down by four percent in the past 24-hours, trading around $36,883, while ether (ETH) is hovering around $2.494, with a market cap of $297 billion, as seen on CoinMarketCap.