Bitwise CIO Makes the Case for $1 Million Bitcoin, but the Story Starts in Lagos and Mumbai
By Verse Press | March 10, 2026
In Nigeria, 89% of all crypto purchases are bitcoin. In India, retail users have absorbed digital assets at a scale that has placed the country at the top of Chainalysis's 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. These are not curiosities. They are the reason that a recent note from Bitwise Asset Management CIO Matt Hougan, reiterating a long-held $1 million price target for bitcoin, lands differently outside the US than it does on Wall Street, even if Hougan himself frames his case in the language of institutional finance rather than street-level currency survival.
That note, which reiterates a position Hougan has argued in various forms over the past several years and was reported on by The Block and Unchained Crypto, rests on a single structural claim: investors are evaluating bitcoin using a fixed market size when the market itself is expanding. Bitcoin is trading near $70,828 as of March 10, with a total market cap of roughly $1.33 trillion. That places it at less than 4% of the combined store-of-value market, a figure currently estimated at around $38 trillion, reflecting gold at approximately $36 trillion combined with bitcoin's current market capitalization.
The Gold ETF Parallel
Hougan's model draws directly from gold's post-ETF expansion. When the first US gold ETF (SPDR Gold Shares) launched in 2004, gold's total market capitalization was approximately $2.5 trillion. Today that figure stands near $40 trillion, representing a compound annual growth rate of about 13%. Hougan argues that the January 2024 launch of US spot bitcoin ETFs is a structurally comparable inflection point for bitcoin's access and legitimacy.
If the broader store-of-value market grows at a similar pace over the next decade, Hougan projects it could reach roughly $121 trillion. That projection assumes the store-of-value asset class continues expanding at its historical rate, a condition that is not guaranteed and that Hougan acknowledges as the key variable in the model. At that size, bitcoin would need only a 17% share to sustain a price of $1 million per coin. That is not a majority claim on global savings. It is a minority position in a larger pool.
"The biggest mistake in bitcoin valuation is surprisingly basic," Hougan wrote. "Investors are using static math for a moving market."
His longer-term outlook, shared in a January 2026 interview, extends the projection to $6.5 million per bitcoin over 20 years, citing persistent global debt expansion and currency debasement as the structural forces pushing savers toward assets outside the traditional financial system. "As long as the future isn't dramatically different from the last 15 years, we get there," he said.
Institutional Capital Is Already Moving
The ETF data supports the early stages of Hougan's thesis. US spot bitcoin ETFs held $27 billion in assets under management at their January 2024 launch. By late 2025, that figure had grown to $122 billion. Analysts now forecast the total will exceed $180 billion by the end of 2026. Major US wire houses including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard have opened bitcoin ETF distribution to their clients.
As of mid-2024, roughly 1,100 institutional holders had disclosed bitcoin ETF positions, a 14% quarter-over-quarter increase. The median allocation across those portfolios was just 0.47%, which Hougan interprets as a sign of significant room for further inflows rather than a ceiling.
Bitwise separately projects that ETFs will absorb more than 100% of newly mined bitcoin supply in 2026, which would create structural demand pressure at the production level.
That concentration of capital is currently heaviest in the US and Europe. But the store-of-value thesis being assembled on Wall Street is already a lived reality in other markets, where currency devaluation has made the underlying argument not a projection but a daily condition.
Why This Argument Lands Differently Outside the US
The store-of-value framing is not abstract in markets where currency devaluation is a lived condition rather than a macroeconomic theory. Nigeria processed $92.1 billion in on-chain crypto volume over the 12 months ending June 2025, a figure that Chainalysis data places at nearly three times the volume recorded in South Africa over the same period. With the naira having lost substantial purchasing power over the past several years, Nigerian users have already made bitcoin their primary crypto holding by a wide margin. South Africa shows a similar pattern, with bitcoin accounting for 74% of crypto purchases.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, on-chain crypto transaction value reached $205 billion between July 2024 and June 2025, up 52% year over year. The region ranks as the third fastest-growing crypto market globally, and its transaction profile skews heavily toward retail participation, with sub-$10,000 transactions making up a larger share of volume than the global average.
In South Asia, India leads the Chainalysis 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, driven by grassroots exchange and DeFi participation. Pakistan ranks third, with a significant share of activity flowing through Binance P2P channels and a growing bitcoin remittance corridor that reflects demand for portable value transfers across borders. For retail users in both countries, formal access to dollar-denominated savings accounts is limited, and bitcoin functions as one of the few portable stores of value available outside the banking system. That said, India's 30% flat tax on crypto gains, with no provisions for offsetting losses, continues to dampen active trading even as long-term holding persists. The Reserve Bank of India remains opposed to private crypto and is actively advancing its own digital rupee through BRICS integration talks.
Near-Term Picture and What to Watch
Hougan's own near-term forecast is considerably more measured than the headline number. He projects bitcoin will trade sideways between $75,000 and $100,000 through the first half of 2026, which is the more operationally relevant range for remittance users and merchants in Lagos, Karachi, and Mumbai.
The $1 million figure depends on a decade of compounding assumptions holding: continued growth in the store-of-value asset class, sustained institutional inflows, and bitcoin's volatility continuing to decline. On that last point, Hougan has noted that bitcoin is now less volatile than Nvidia stock, a marker of how substantially the asset's risk profile has shifted from its early years. Hougan acknowledges that central bank adoption, which would be a significant accelerant, is likely 10 to 20 years away. The math is internally consistent. Whether the underlying conditions persist is the open question.
For any reader with a stake in bitcoin's long-term trajectory, the near-term signal may be more actionable than the headline target: sustained institutional interest supports deeper liquidity and continued infrastructure investment, regardless of when or whether the seven-figure price arrives. For developers building on Bitcoin and Lightning Network infrastructure in emerging markets specifically, that continuity of institutional commitment is precisely the condition that makes durable, long-horizon infrastructure investment viable.