ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said she would “make a shift from gold into Bitcoin” after gold’s rally left the metal looking extended on a liquidity-adjusted measure. She argued bitcoin’s supply dynamics and long-term adoption case still favor the crypto despite a sluggish year.
Speaking on the Feb. 2 episode of The Rundown, Wood placed the call within ARK’s “great acceleration” thesis from its latest Big Ideas report, which expects AI-driven capex to surge and spill into robotics, energy storage, blockchain, and life sciences as converging S-curves accelerate innovation.
Sell Gold, Buy Bitcoin Now?
Wood pushed back on the notion that bitcoin has “lost its mojo” as gold outperformed recently, noting a statistical finding: “Bitcoin and gold are not correlated. We did the analysis […] the correlation […] is as close to zero as you can get so no correlation.” She observed that in prior cycles gold led before bitcoin caught up.
Her sharper warning targeted gold’s position versus broad money. “You’ll find this […] a chart showing gold divided by M2. It has only been—it has never been higher. It hit a new all-time high this week,” she said, likening the setup to historical extremes that preceded very different macro regimes. “Gold is probably riding for a fall […] The last two times it was anywhere near this was in the massive inflation […] in the 70s early 80s and […] the Great Depression.”
Wood acknowledged the stablecoin boom has taken some transaction use cases that once supported bitcoin in emerging markets, but framed that as a payments-layer substitution rather than a savings-layer replacement: “That’s just for the equivalent of a checking account. When they want real savings, they’re going to buy Bitcoin, we believe.” She tied the view to ARK’s long-term upside, citing a bull-case target of $1.5 million by 2030 under the firm’s seven-figure framework.
Her core comparative point versus gold focused on issuance. “The supply growth of Bitcoin is 0.8% per year and it’ll drop to 0.4 in another two years,” Wood said, contrasting that with gold’s supply growth at roughly 1% on average and noting mining output could exceed bitcoin’s deterministic issuance. She also pointed to intergenerational wealth transfer as a potential bitcoin tailwind.
Wood offered a tactical explanation for bitcoin’s recent difficulty sustaining rallies, blaming an October 10 “flash crash” tied to a Binance software glitch and a cascade of auto-deleveraging: “There was a flash crash caused by a software glitch at Binance and there was an auto deleveraging event. People were just […] margin called to the tune of about 28 billion dollars […] and we think that is just now washing through the system.” Because bitcoin is “the most liquid of all crypto assets,” she said it becomes “the first margin call,” making it the main source of forced selling during broad deleveraging.
She suggested that overhang is fading, though her remarks preceded a downdraft that saw bitcoin slide to $74,600. In the interview she said the market was “testing […] around 80,000 again” and expected it to “hold in the 80 to 90,000 range” absent a major geopolitical shock. “Unless all hell breaks loose in Iran […] then maybe we’ll see the store of value come back for Bitcoin,” she added.
At press time, BTC traded at $78,377.
Bitcoin remains above the 1.0 Fibonacci level, 1-week chart | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView.com
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
