Cathie Wood says one part of ARK Invest's long-running Bitcoin thesis has not worked out as expected. Stablecoins are "usurping a role that 10 years ago we thought Bitcoin was going to play," she said. Even so, she said the firm has not changed its forecast.
Wood is the founder, chief executive and chief investment officer of ARK Invest, a fund manager that invests in technologies such as AI, robotics and blockchain. She spoke at Moonshots Live 2026, a stage event recorded on September 25, 2026 for the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast and released on September 29. The host, Peter Diamandis, closed the session by reminding her that she had been bullish about $1 million Bitcoin on an earlier Abundance stage. He asked whether she still was, and whether AI's appetite for energy worried her as a threat to Bitcoin mining.
Three things that hit Bitcoin
Wood began with what had gone wrong. She named three things that had hit Bitcoin: a flash crash, fears about quantum computing and AI "taking all the oxygen out of the room" and taking miners away.
A flash crash is a sudden, steep fall in price. The quantum fear is that powerful future quantum computers could break the cryptography that secures Bitcoin. Wood said ARK thinks these fears are "way overblown."
Her third point answered Diamandis's energy question. Mining, the energy-intensive computing that secures the Bitcoin network and issues new coins, competes with AI for power and hardware, and Wood described miners being pulled away toward AI.
The one real change: stablecoins
Stablecoins are digital tokens designed to hold a steady value, usually one US dollar each. They run on blockchains, as Bitcoin does, but they do not rise and fall with Bitcoin's price. The event was presented with Circle, which issues the USDC stablecoin. Circle's chief product and technology officer, Nikhil Chandhok, was also on stage.
Wood said this shift "makes a lot of sense." She pointed to people who "live hand to mouth." For someone spending most of their income soon after receiving it, a dollar-pegged token is a more practical way to be paid and to pay than an asset whose price swings.
The three roles she says Bitcoin keeps
Wood said Bitcoin "hasn't lost the three major roles" she sees for it:
- Money native to the internet. Bitcoin introduced a currency that exists natively online, something she said "wasn't there before."
- A global, private, rules-based monetary system. She called this "critical."
- A new asset class. She described Bitcoin as the first of its kind, with very low correlation even to gold. Correlation measures how closely two prices move together: 1 means they move in lockstep and 0 means there is no relationship. By her figure, the correlation between Bitcoin and gold since 2019 has been 0.1, "so hardly correlated at all." She said Bitcoin was now rising relative to gold.
She also said she believes Warsh "is going to be very good for Bitcoin" and that the gold price will go down. She referred to Warsh without further identification. She said people who had been using gold that way would look for the other "safe harbor," a phrase Diamandis offered and she completed as "store of value."
Why the forecast stands
"We have not changed our forecast," Wood said. In her telling, stablecoins could help Bitcoin rather than simply replace it. They "grease the skids," getting more people talking about digital money. Someone earning stablecoin income eventually reaches the point of thinking, "I'm actually making money now. Where do I put it?" She expects Bitcoin to "get a bid from the emerging markets," meaning buying demand, "as we always thought it would." She gave no date for $1 million.
How ARK builds its numbers
ARK has published its method for Bitcoin price targets. In an April 2025 explanation of its 2030 targets, ARK analyst David Puell describes an adoption-based model. It estimates the size of markets Bitcoin could take a share of, assumes how much of each it captures, and divides the result by roughly 20.5 million coins expected to be outstanding in 2030. Institutional investment, demand for Bitcoin as "digital gold" and emerging-market savings make the largest contributions. Corporate treasuries, national reserves and on-chain finance add smaller amounts. ARK's published 2025 scenarios were roughly $300,000 (bear), $710,000 (base) and $1.5 million (bull), so $1 million sits between the base and bull cases.
Those scenarios were published about a year and a half before this conversation and depend on the market sizes and adoption rates ARK assumes. Wood's emerging-market argument corresponds to one of the model's largest inputs: savings flowing into Bitcoin. Her concession about stablecoins concerns everyday payments, not savings.
The publisher notes that the views expressed on the show are personal opinions and do not constitute financial advice.