ETH to hit $20-trillion market cap by 2030: Ark Invest

A new report from Cathy Woods’ Ark Invest forecasts Ether (ETH) will meet or even exceed a $20-trillion market capitalization within the next 10 years, which would equate to a price of around $170,000–$180,000 per ETH.

The report also predicted big things for Bitcoin (BTC), saying it is “likely to scale as nation-states adopt (it) as legal tender… the price of one bitcoin could exceed $1 million by 2030.”

Ark Invest is a tech-focused American asset management firm based in the United States with $12.43 billion in assets under management.

#BigIdeas2022 Report is here!

To enlighten investors on the impact of breakthrough technologies we began publishing Big Ideas in 2017. This annual research report seeks to highlight our most provocative research conclusions for the year. Download! https://t.co/QvUbuqVpIL

— ARK Invest (@ARKInvest) January 26, 2022

The prediction in Ark Invest’s report “Big Ideas 2022” is predicated on how quickly the Ethereum network has grown in utility and efficiency. Much of the growth over the past two years has come from decentralized finance (DeFi). Ark described the appeal of DeFi, stating:

“Decentralized Finance promises more interoperability, transparency, and financial services while minimizing intermediary fees and counterparty risk.”

According to Ark, smart contracts and decentralized applications on Ethereum are “usurping traditional financial functions at the margin.” The report highlighted that banking and lending, exchanges, brokerages, asset management, insurance and derivatives can all be found on Ethereum-based smart contracts.

What’s more, DeFi is a lot more efficient, too. Ark estimated that DeFi outperformed traditional finance over the last 12 months in terms of revenue per employee from $88 million to $8 million.

In terms of Bitcoin, the report forecasts $1.36 million per BTC with a market cap of $28.5 trillion by 2030. Ark researchers assigned an estimated future value to eight of Bitcoin’s use cases and used the sum of all of them to reach its conclusion about BTC’s price. 

By 2030, the firm expects Bitcoin to account for 50% of global remittances at 1.5x velocity, 10% of emerging markets’ currency, 25% of United States bank settlement volumes, 1% of nation-state treasuries worldwide, 5% of global high-net-worth individual wealth, 2.55% of institutional asset base, 5% of the cash from S&P 500 companies, and 50% of gold’s total market cap.

Ark also argued that Bitcoin mining “could revolutionize energy production.” While global concerns have been raised about the tremendous amount of energy that Bitcoin mining requires, the researchers believe that “Bitcoin mining will encourage and generate more electricity from renewable carbon-free sources.”

“The addition of Bitcoin mining into power developers’ toolboxes should increase the overall addressable market for renewable and intermittent power sources.”

Related: Ban less likely? Putin says crypto mining has advantages in Russia

Both ETH and BTC have had a rough past seven days by falling 22.2% and 13%, respectively, according to CoinGecko.