Cathie Wood’s $1 million bold call on bitcoin surprised many on Wall Street amid the fallout in the crypto industry, and here’s how the investor came up with the prediction. The ARK Invest chief sees the world’s largest cryptocurrency hitting about $1.3 million by 2030, benefitting from the FTX turmoil, she said during the latest CNBC PRO Talks installment with Dominic Chu . “If anything, we think this cycle has benefited bitcoin,” Wood said. “Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t like bitcoin…. Because it couldn’t be controlled. It was decentralized, open, transparent the antithesis of what FTX was.” “Bitcoin and ethereum, I would add, have distinguished themselves in this time period as some of these opaque closed, centralized ecosystems have gone bankrupt, gone down,” Wood added. Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection . FTX indicates it has more than 100,000 creditors, assets in the range of $10 billion to $50 billion, as well as liabilities in the range of $10 billion to $50 billion. Distressed crypto firm BlockFi has also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following the implosion of putative acquirer FTX. Bitcoin briefly sunk to two-year lows as digital coins reeled from the fallout from FTX’s demise. The cryptocurrency bounced back above $16,000 as of Tuesday. Wood, a longtime crypto bull, believes the price of bitcoin could surge if companies continue to diversify their cash and institutional investors continue to allocate 5% of their portfolio to the space. The innovation investor believes institutions now allocate about 2.5% to cryptocurrencies in their portfolios, less than the percentage of exposure they started adding to real estate in the 1970s and emerging markets in the 1980s. “Crypto is the new asset class,” Wood said. “We still expect bitcoin to benefit. I think when this story is told and the a-ha moments take place, ‘wait. Sam Bankman-Fried did not like Bitcoin. Oh, for a reason. What reason?’ This is the reason it might end up adding to credibility.” Wood bought more crypto-related assets over the past two weeks during the crisis, including the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and Coinbase . ARK said in a recent newsletter there were “several silver linings” to these events, including that the bitcoin blockchain continued to operate during FTX’s crisis and arguing that this would push the industry to be more transparent.
