Bitcoin at $1 million? You must be joking, netizens troll Cathie Wood on her forecast

Catherine Wood, chief executive officer of ARK Investment Management LLC, participates in a panel discussion during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Monday, May 2, 2022. Photographer: Lauren Justice/Bloomberg

Cathie Wood is holding on to her forecast of Bitcoin reaching $1 million by 2030 and the internet is in splits.

The founder, CEO and CIO of Ark Invest, an investment firm, in an interview with Bloomberg, averred the prospects of Bitcoin despite the crypto hitting a two-year low, which led to netizens joking about her prediction.

"Bitcoin is coming out smelling like a rose, one thing that will be delayed perhaps the institutions stepping back, once they actually do the homework and see what's happened here, I think they'd be more comfortable moving into Bitcoin and Ether as a starting point."

Conviction intact

Ark Invest also added 176,945 shares in Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) fund, totalling nearly $1.4 million, buttressing the founder's conviction in the crypto. This is the Florida-based company's second significant GBTC acquisition in the last two weeks. It acquired approximately 315,000 GBTC shares last week for a total of $2.8 million.

Poking fun at the claim, Samir Arora, founder of Helios Capital, tweeted in Hindi, "New entry received for 2022 'Phenko to Lambi Phenko' awards", or Wood's forecast deserves an award for spinning tall tales.

On November 22, Bitcoin hit a two-year low, as per CoinGecko data, settling at $15,649. It is over 26 percent down from the $21,418 hit on November 5, before word on crypto exchange FTX’s financial issues leaked out.

"Sometimes you need to battle test, you need to go through crises, to see who the survivors are, to battle test the infra and the thesis," Wood said on the tumultuous Bitcoin ride this year.

Crypto losing ground?

Earlier this year, Wood took the Federal Reserve to task for its aggressive monetary tightening as her innovation-themed ETFs plummeted amid rising interest rates.

Investor sentiment about crypto has been downbeat and prominent figures such as Bill Gates have dismissed cryptocurrency projects including nonfungible tokens as shams “based on the greater fool theory”.

Closer home, the RBI too is opposed to the idea of cryptocurrencies, saying that cryptos cannot be defined as a currency, asset or commodity; they have no underlying cash flows, they have no intrinsic value; they are akin to Ponzi Schemes, and maybe worse.

Repeated warnings from Mint Road had also come when the crypto lobby was waging a nationwide campaign to attract fresh investors into India’s unregulated virtual currency market.