Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan is making the case that Bitcoin's next decade will be defined not by retail speculation but by the slow, structural entry of the world's largest pools of capital. Hougan's target: $1.3 million per Bitcoin by 2035, a figure he says only requires roughly 1% of global institutional assets — a pool he estimates at $100 trillion to $200 trillion — to rotate into the asset over the coming years.
CoinDesk reported that Hougan frames the shift as a multi-stage process rather than a single wave. Financial advisers and family offices are already moving first, a trend visible in recent 13F filings, and Hougan expects foundations, endowments and pension plans to follow, then insurance companies, and eventually sovereign wealth funds and central banks. "Institutions have most of the money in the world," Hougan said. "Crypto grew up in retail, which took it from $0 to $2 trillion." He puts the full process at 10-plus years to play out.
The gold comparison behind the math
Hougan's underlying thesis leans heavily on gold's own institutionalization. He points out that gold's total market capitalization grew from roughly $2 trillion in 2004 — the year the first gold ETF launched — to around $30 trillion today, a run that averaged about 13% annual growth as institutions gradually treated it as a legitimate store-of-value allocation rather than a fringe asset. Hougan's call is that Bitcoin could eventually capture 25% of an expanding store-of-value market as it follows a similar institutional adoption curve, with firms like Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo already working to make Bitcoin exposure easier for their wealth-management clients to access.
Early signs of the pattern Hougan describes
There's evidence the early stages of that shift are already underway. Research on the broader ETF-driven adoption cycle notes that the ETF wrapper effectively removed the structural barriers that kept pension funds, endowments and registered investment advisers out of direct crypto exposure — as one analysis put it, a pension fund can now hold a spot Bitcoin ETF in the same brokerage account as its Apple stock. Pension fund participation itself remains at an early stage: US plans are gradually adding ETF positions, while plans in the UK and parts of Asia have only recently begun evaluating direct allocations, and sovereign wealth funds and central banks have started showing up as ETF holders in 13F filings, though the disclosed positions so far are still modest relative to the pools Hougan is describing.
Corporate treasuries have moved faster than pension capital. Strategy, the software company turned Bitcoin treasury vehicle, now holds 842,138 BTC, making it the largest corporate holder of the asset by a wide margin — a scale of concentrated corporate buying that predates the institutional wave Hougan is now forecasting from pensions, insurers and sovereign funds. For more on how that view intersects with Bitcoin's price floor, see Nansen's founder arguing Bitcoin will never trade below $60K again.
Related: Nansen Founder Says Bitcoin Will Never Trade Below $60K Again
The gap between thesis and timeline
Even Hougan's own framing concedes the bulk of this capital hasn't moved yet — the 1% shift he's describing is a decade-long projection, not a current allocation, and each stage of his adoption ladder (foundations, insurers, sovereign wealth, central banks) has historically moved slower than the one before it. The gold precedent took roughly two decades to fully play out after the first gold ETF launched, which is itself a reason to treat a 2035 target as a directional thesis rather than a forecast with a fixed arrival date. Recent whale-sized Bitcoin movements onto exchanges are a reminder that near-term price action can still swing on much smaller flows than the trillion-dollar shifts Hougan is describing.
