ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said she would “make a shift from gold to Bitcoin” after gold’s run made the metal look extended on a key liquidity-adjusted measure, arguing that Bitcoin’s supply dynamics and long-term adoption still favor the crypto asset despite a sluggish year.
Speaking on a February 2 episode of The Rundown interviewWood framed the call as part of a broader “big acceleration” thesis laid out in ARK’s latest “Big Ideas” report, which expects AI-driven capital spending to rise and flow into robotics, energy storage, blockchain and life sciences via what she described as converging S-curves.
Sell gold, buy Bitcoin now?
Wood pushed back on the idea that bitcoin has “lost its mojo” because gold has outperformed in recent years, starting with a statistical point. “The first thing you need to know is that Bitcoin and gold are not correlated. We have done the analysis […] the correlation […] is as close to zero as you can get, so there is no correlation,” she said, adding that in the last two market cycles, gold led bitcoin before crypto assets caught up.
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Her stronger warning focused on gold’s positioning against broad money. ‘You will find this […] a graph showing gold divided by M2. It’s just been – it’s never been this high. It hit a new all-time high this week,” Wood said, arguing that the situation resembles historical extremes that have coincided with very different macro regimes. “Gold is likely headed for a decline. […] The last two times it was even close to this, due to enormous inflation […] in the seventies, early eighties and […] the Great Depression.”
Wood said the stablecoin boom has absorbed some of Bitcoin’s transaction story across emerging markets, but she characterized this as a replacement for the payments layer rather than a replacement for the savings layer. “That’s just for the equivalent of a checking account. If they really want savings, they’re going to buy Bitcoin, we think,” she said, linking her view to ARK’s positive long-term scenario. She referred in the conversation to a bull-case target of $1.5 million by 2030, in addition to the company’s previously discussed seven-figure framework.
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Her main comparative claim against gold focused on its issuance. “Bitcoin supply growth is at 0.8% per year and will decline to 0.4 in another two years,” Wood said, contrasting with gold supply growth which she pegged at around 1% on average and suggesting that mining production could exceed Bitcoin’s deterministic issuance rate. She also pointed to “intergenerational wealth transfer” as a potential tailwind for bitcoin over time.
Wood also offered a more tactical explanation for why bitcoin is struggling to maintain upward momentum, pointing to what she described as an Oct. 10 “flash crash” linked to a software glitch at Binance and a cascade of automatic deleveraging. “There was a flash crash caused by a software glitch at Binance and an automatic deleveraging took place,” she said. “People were fair […] margin of approximately $28 billion […] and we think this is only now washing through the system.
Because bitcoin is “the most liquid of all crypto assets,” Wood argued that it will become “the first margin call,” making it the main source of forced selling during a broad deleveraging effort. She suggested the overhang is now fading, but her comments came before Monday’s downturn, which saw bitcoin fall to $74,600. In the interview, she said the market was “testing.” […] around 80,000 again” and expected it “to remain between 80 and 90,000” without a major geopolitical shock. “Unless all hell breaks loose in Iran […] then we might see the store of value for Bitcoin come back,” she added.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $78,377.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com