Ark Invest releases Bitcoin valuation model: BTC price starts at $500,000 per coin in 2030

المؤلف الأصلي: David Puell , Analyst at Ark Invest

تم تجميعها بواسطة Odaily Planet Daily ( @أوديلي تشاينا )

المترجم: CryptoLeo ( @ليواند كريبتو )

ملحوظة المحرر:

At the beginning of the year, Ark Invest, a Bitcoin die-hard bull and Wood Sister, released the Big Ideas 2025 report, mentioning three price targets that Bitcoin is expected to achieve by 2030: $300,000 (bear market), $710,000 (benchmark market) and $1.5 million (bull market). At that time, it just simply shouted a price far beyond market expectations (as crazy as Plan B), and did not disclose the actual estimation process.

Two months later, Ark Invest finally announced its modeling method and logical assumptions for Bitcoins 2030 price target. The model predicts Bitcoins price in 2023 through Bitcoins total potential market size (TAM) and penetration rate ( popularity or share ).

Even more encouraging (exaggerated) is the calculation based on Bitcoins active supply indicator created by Ark Invest, where the price of Bitcoin in 2030 is: $500,000 (bear market), $1.2 million (base market) and $2.4 million (bull market). If any of the TAM or penetration rates do not meet expectations, Bitcoin may not reach these price targets. So there are also some risks and deviations in this model. The following are the specific details of the Bitcoin price prediction, compiled by Odaily Planet Daily.

Price Targets and Assumptions

Our price target is the sum of the TAM (Total Addressable سوق) contributions at the end of 2030, based on the following formula:

Odaily Planet Daily Note: This formula predicts the price of Bitcoin in 2030 by quantifying the dynamic relationship between market demand and Bitcoin circulation. The Bitcoin price is obtained by multiplying the maximum dollar benchmark demand size of the market segment by the penetration rate of Bitcoin in its market and dividing it by the circulating supply of Bitcoin, and the price of Bitcoin in 2030 is predicted by summing the prices of all market segments (the following market segments/concepts).

Our supply estimate is based on the circulating supply of Bitcoin, which is close to 20.5 million BTC mined by 2030. The contribution of each variable to the price target is as follows:

Contributors to estimated capital accumulation (mainly):

1. Institutional investment, mainly through spot ETFs;

2. Bitcoin is called digital gold by some people. Compared with gold, it is a more flexible and transparent means of storing value;

3. Emerging market investors seek safe havens that can protect them from inflation and currency depreciation.

Contributors to estimated capital accumulation (minor):

4. National treasury reserves. Other countries follow the example of the United States and establish strategic reserves of Bitcoin;

5. Corporate treasury reserves, as more and more companies use Bitcoin to diversify their fiat cash;

6. Financial services on the Bitcoin chain, Bitcoin as an alternative to traditional finance.

Excluding digital gold (which is excluded from our model as it is Bitcoins most direct zero-sum competitor), we conservatively assume that the TAM of the above contributors (specifically 1, 3, 4, and 5) will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3% over the next six years. For the sixth contributor, Bitcoins on-chain financial services, we assume a 6-year CAGR of between 20% and 60%, based on the cumulative value as of the end of 2024, as follows:

Odaily Planet Daily Note: This formula calculates Bitcoin TAM six years from now by the total value of Bitcoin in 2024 and the compound annual growth rate, and divides it by the circulating supply of Bitcoin in 2030 to calculate its price.

Finally, we describe the contribution of TAM and penetration to the bear, baseline, and bull price targets, respectively, as follows:

As shown above, “digital gold” contributes the most to our bear and base cases, while institutional investment contributes the most to our bull case. Interestingly, national treasuries, corporate treasuries, and Bitcoin on-chain financial services contribute relatively little in each scenario. In the table below, we detail the relative contributions of our six predicted sources of capital accumulation to the bear, base case, and bull case scenarios:

Odaily Planet Daily Note: The following charts are the estimated TAM of the market segments in 2030, the Bitcoin penetration rate under three market conditions, and the contribution ratio in the above chart.

1. Potential contributors to capital accumulation: institutional investment

According to State Street, the global market portfolio is تحديned as follows:

The market value of all investable capital assets divided by the sum of the market values of all assets. As the sum of all holdings resulting from the collective decisions of investors and issuers, as well as capital suppliers and demanders, the global market portfolio can be considered a practical representation of the investable opportunity set for all investors worldwide.

By 2024, the TAM of global portfolios is approximately $169 trillion (excluding gold’s 3.6% share). Assuming a 3% CAGR, this would be worth approximately $200 trillion by 2030.

We assume penetration rates of 1% and 2.5% for the bear and benchmark markets, respectively, both below gold’s current share of 3.6%. Therefore, the bear and benchmark markets represent conservative views of Bitcoin adoption. Under a more aggressive bull case, we assume Bitcoin penetration reaches 6.5%, nearly double gold’s current share.

2. Potential Contributors to Capital Accumulation: Digital Gold

The contribution of digital gold assumes a ratio of TAM relative to the current market cap of gold. Given the positive penetration given, we assume that gold’s expected TAM in 2030 will not grow, thus reducing its expected value. We believe that Bitcoin as digital gold is an attractive narrative that will drive its penetration.

3. Potential contributors to capital accumulation: emerging market safe havens

Emerging Markets Safe Haven TAM is based on the monetary base of all developing countries (also known as “non-developed” economies, as defined by the IMF/CIA). We believe this use case for Bitcoin has the greatest potential for capital appreciation. In addition to its store of value properties, Bitcoin’s low barrier to entry provides individuals with an internet connection with an investment option that may provide capital appreciation over time, unlike defensive allocations such as the US dollar – thereby preserving purchasing power and avoiding devaluation of their own currencies.

Odaily Planet Daily Note: M2 is an indicator that measures the money stock in the United States, including M1 (currency and deposits held by the non-bank public, checkable deposits and travelers checks) plus savings deposits (including money market deposit accounts), small time deposits of less than US$100,000, and retail money market mutual fund shares.

4. Potential contributors to capital accumulation: national treasury

While El Salvador and Bhutan currently lead the world in terms of national Bitcoin adoption, advocates for a strategic Bitcoin reserve are growing — especially since Trump took office, when he issued an executive order on March 6 to establish a BTC reserve in the U.S. While our bear and base case assumptions are conservative, we believe the U.S. may further validate our bull case assumption of 7% penetration.

5. Potential contributors to capital accumulation: corporate bonds

Inspired by the successful purchase of Bitcoin by Strategy since 2020, other companies have also included Bitcoin in their corporate treasury reserves. By the end of 2024, 74 public companies held about $55 billion in Bitcoin on their balance sheets. If these corporate BTC strategies prove successful over the next six years, our conservative penetration assumptions in the bear and baseline scenarios (1% and 2.5%, respectively) may eventually be close to the 10% in the bull scenario.

6. Potential Contributors to Capital Accumulation: Bitcoin On-Chain Financial Services

Bitcoin’s native financial services are emerging contributors to capital accumulation. Prominent examples include Layer 2 services like the Lightning Network, which is dedicated to expanding Bitcoin’s transaction capacity, and Wrapped BTC (WBTC) on the Ethereum network, which enables Bitcoin to participate in decentralized finance. Such on-chain financial services are becoming an increasingly important feature of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Therefore, we believe that the benchmark market’s 40% CAGR from now to 2030 is a realistic expectation.

ARK’s assumptions apply to active Bitcoin supply

While not included in ARK’s Big Ideas 2025 report, other experimental modeling approaches have estimated the price of Bitcoin in 2030. One of these uses Bitcoin’s on-chain transparency to estimate Bitcoin’s liquid supply — what we call “active” supply — by accounting for lost or long-held Bitcoin.

According to this methodology, active supply can be calculated by multiplying Bitcoin’s expected supply in 2030 by a “activity” metric, which measures the amount of Bitcoin that has moved from 0% to 100% over time — in other words, the asset’s true “float,” as shown below.

As shown in the chart, Bitcoin’s network activity has remained around 60% since the beginning of 2018. We believe this level of activity indicates that about 40% of the supply is “vaulted” — a concept we explore in depth in our ARK whitepaper, Cointime Economics: A New Framework for On-Chain Analysis of Bitcoin .

We then apply the same bear and baseline TAM and penetration rates to a scenario where active supply is expected to reach 60% by 2030 (assuming activity remains stable over time), as follows:

On this basis, we arrive at the following price targets, which are approximately 40% higher than our base model, which does not account for Bitcoin active supply and network activity:

The model shows that the estimated price of BTC in 2030 based on the new BTC activity indicator is: $500,000 (bear market), $1.2 million (baseline market) and $2.4 million (bull market).

Importantly, the valuations constructed using this more experimental approach are more aggressive than those in our bear, baseline, and bull scenarios. Since our official price target is more conservative, it focuses only on the total supply of Bitcoin. Even so, we believe that this more experimental approach highlights that Bitcoin’s scarcity and supply loss are not reflected in most valuation models today.

Extra

I took a quick look at the Cointime Economics framework, which proposes a new system for analyzing Bitcoin valuation and inflation rate. It calculates Bitcoin economic status and supply activity through Bitcoin liveliness and vaultedness, which can measure the transaction activity and the proportion of unused coins in the Bitcoin network. Using these two indicators, Bitcoin supply can be classified into active supply and unused supply.

The framework also proposes a unit of measurement, Coinblock. The Coinblock concept provides a new set of on-chain analysis indicators to measure Bitcoin activity. The number of Coinblocks is obtained by calculating the product of the holding time and the number of Bitcoins. It also introduces the concepts of Coinblock creation, Coinblock destruction and Coinblock storage, and builds a series of new economic indicators based on this, such as Bitcoin activity and lock-up, to measure the dynamic changes and economic status of the Bitcoin market. In addition, the content also demonstrates the potential of Cointime Economics in improving market valuation models, measuring supply activities, and creating new models through case studies. The Coinblock concept and the Cointime economic framework may become the main reference for Bitcoin valuation in the future. Interested friends can go and see the original PDF .

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