ARK Invest
Cathie Wood says bitcoin is still in its "very early" stages and could see its market capitalization swell into the trillions.
"You do get into the trillions of dollars of market cap potential out there," Wood said, speaking on a panel during the Bloomberg Crypto Summit Thursday.
Wood, founder of fund manager ARK Invest, likened the world's most popular currency to an equally famous technology company.
"When you think the market cap of Bitcoin is roughly $950 billion, think about that in the context of an Apple," Wood said. "It's less than half of Apple's valuation and here we're talking about the reserve currency of the crypto asset world."
Bitcoin on February 19, catapulted it to a market capitalization of $1 trillion for the first time and touched a high of $53,262 on the same day. The price pulled back to start this week after hitting a high of over $58,000 on Sunday.
Bitcoin is trading higher by 0.58%, at $49,850 as of 12:39PM ET Thursday.
Wood also admitted that the announcements supporting bitcoin from major institutions from Tesla to Mastercard was a pleasant surprise.
"We expected institutional investors to start moving in," she said. "What we did not expect from institutions was the diversification on their balance sheet and a diversification of their cash assets into bitcoin."
Wood has been a longtime bitcoin believer. As of December 2020, Wood's ARK Invest, which runs three of the highest-returning stock ETFs of the last three years, now holds more than seven million shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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- A hedge fund chief and crypto bull shares a SPAC investing strategy set to benefit in the inevitable bear market — and breaks down why digital assets will be the next big beneficiary of the SPAC boom
