ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said she would shift allocations from gold into Bitcoin after judging gold’s recent rally extended on a liquidity-adjusted basis. Speaking on the Feb. 2 episode of The Rundown, Wood framed the move within ARK’s “great acceleration” thesis from its latest Big Ideas report, which forecasts AI-driven capital spending spilling into robotics, energy storage, blockchain and life sciences as multiple S-curves converge.
Wood dismissed the idea that bitcoin has “lost its mojo” despite gold’s recent outperformance, citing ARK’s analysis that the correlation between bitcoin and gold is essentially zero. She noted that in prior cycles gold has often led before bitcoin caught up.
Her stronger critique was aimed at gold’s standing versus broad money. Wood pointed to a chart of gold divided by M2 money supply that reached a new all-time high, a reading she described as historically extreme and similar to levels seen in the 1970s–early 1980s inflationary period and the Great Depression. She warned that such extremes have preceded sharply different macro regimes and said gold may be vulnerable to a pullback.
By contrast, Wood highlighted bitcoin’s issuance profile as a structural advantage. ARK’s view emphasizes bitcoin’s falling supply growth — roughly 0.8% today, declining to about 0.4% in two years — versus gold’s long-run supply growth near 1%, with mining output potentially outpacing bitcoin’s deterministic issuance. She also flagged intergenerational wealth transfer as a potential tailwind for crypto adoption.
Wood acknowledged that stablecoins have captured many transactional use cases in emerging markets, effectively acting as a payments-layer substitute, but argued they don’t replace bitcoin as a savings vehicle. That distinction underpins ARK’s long-term bullish framework, which includes a bull-case price target of $1.5 million per bitcoin by 2030 under its seven-figure scenario.
She offered a tactical explanation for bitcoin’s recent difficulty sustaining rallies: an October 10 “flash crash” tied to a Binance software glitch triggered a cascade of auto-deleveraging and margin calls — she referenced about $28 billion of forced liquidations — and ARK believes that shock is still washing through the market. Because bitcoin is the most liquid crypto, it tends to be the first asset sold during broad deleveraging, amplifying downside pressure.
Wood suggested that this overhang is fading, although her comments came before a subsequent pullback that pushed bitcoin toward roughly $74,600. In the interview she said markets were “testing around $80,000” and that she expected bitcoin to hold in the $80,000–$90,000 range unless a major geopolitical event occurred. She added that a significant shock — for example escalating conflict in Iran — could restore a stronger store-of-value bid for bitcoin.
At the time of the report, BTC traded around $78,377.