Right now, Bitcoin (BTC 0.83%) has a market cap of about $2 trillion. That’s roughly in line with the valuations of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks, which have valuations ranging from $1.5 trillion to just over $3 trillion.
But there’s an opportunity for Bitcoin to go much higher. In fact, a $20 trillion market cap might be possible by 2030. If investors begin to view Bitcoin as more than just an ultra-risky tech asset, it could unlock trillions of dollars in market cap. Let’s take a closer look.
What is Bitcoin, really?
In 2009, Bitcoin launched as a digital currency, built using blockchain technology and powered by an internal algorithm. Although Bitcoin differed from traditional fiat currencies (such as the U.S. dollar or the Japanese yen) in certain important ways, it was primarily designed to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
As a result, one obvious use case for Bitcoin was as a medium of exchange. In other words, you were supposed to use Bitcoin to pay for things. But, alas, that use case has never fully materialized. When was the last time you used Bitcoin to pay for anything?
That’s why Bitcoin never went mainstream in its early years. Many people who used Bitcoin for payments were people engaged in dubious market dealings that required anonymity. That’s the primary reason big institutional investors and Wall Street banks wouldn’t touch Bitcoin with a 10-foot pole: There was a certain whiff of impropriety around it, and nobody could figure out what to do with it.
But, over time, Bitcoin produced such spectacular returns, year in and year out (with a few years of catastrophic performance mixed in along the way), that many investors began to view it as a hyper-volatile, hyper-speculative tech asset with astonishing upside potential.
Forward-looking investors and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley bought into this idea, and began accumulating Bitcoin at absurdly low valuations. For them, Bitcoin appeared to be a new type of tech investment opportunity, and they attempted to value it as such.
Is Bitcoin now digital gold?
Now, in 2025, Bitcoin has transformed yet again, into a unique asset that some are now calling digital gold. This final transformation could be the key to unlocking its true long-term value.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital (and a former White House Communications Director during the first Trump presidency), briefly described this evolution of Bitcoin. He put it very succinctly: If Bitcoin is just a hyper-risky tech asset, then its true valuation is in the $1 trillion to $3 trillion range. That would put it on par with the Magnificent Seven tech stocks.
But if Bitcoin truly is digital gold, Scaramucci says, then we need to think bigger. The total market cap of gold is roughly $22 trillion, so that logically becomes the new target for valuing Bitcoin. That’s roughly 10 times the current valuation of Bitcoin, so we’re talking about a future price of about $1 million, based on its current price of $104,000.
That might sound like a pie-in-the-sky valuation, except that a surprising number of big-name institutional investors are also tossing around $1 million price targets for Bitcoin. If you dig deep into their valuation models, they are also looking for ways to take into account Bitcoin’s transformation into digital gold.
Two important Bitcoin metrics to watch
If this digital-gold narrative really takes off, we should expect to see several key changes when it comes to Bitcoin. First of all, we should see a decrease in volatility. If people are no longer speculating in Bitcoin, but rather holding it for the long term, then volatility should decline over time.
Image source: Getty Images.
Second, we should see an uptick in the number of Bitcoin owners worldwide. The way to measure that, says Scaramucci, is by looking at the number of active Bitcoin wallets. He’s looking for Bitcoin to hit 1 billion users worldwide. At that point, nearly 1-in-8 people around the globe will hold at least a tiny sliver of Bitcoin.
Based on data from Bitbo, a Bitcoin analytics platform, there are currently 200 million Bitcoin wallets worldwide, and about 100 million Bitcoin owners. (Just like some people have multiple bank accounts, some also have multiple Bitcoin wallets.) As a result, we should expect to see a nearly 10-fold increase in the number of Bitcoin users worldwide.
Is the digital gold thesis correct?
In the future, I will keep my eye on these two metrics. I will be tracking changes in Bitcoin’s volatility over time, and monitoring the number of active Bitcoin wallets. If the digital gold narrative is correct, we should expect to see a drop in volatility, combined with an explosion of new Bitcoin accounts.
When that happens, you will know that Bitcoin has fully arrived as a unique, stand-alone asset. That’s also when you can lock in a price of $1 million for Bitcoin. A billion people around the world can’t be wrong, can they?
