Can bitcoin hit $1 million by 2030? Stacks founder Muneeb Ali thinks so

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No matter what Satoshi intended, bitcoin has come to be more or less treated as digital gold by holders and industry players alike. But that title is under pressure this cycle, says @Muneeb Ali, founder of @Stacks and a four-cycle crypto markets veteran.

“Bitcoin has established itself as digital gold,” Ali acknowledged on @TokenRelations' @_TalkingTokens podcast. So, there should be a strong correlation between bitcoin and gold’s price movements. But in this most recent cycle, that wasn’t the case, something Ali thinks is “puzzling.”

In fact, he thinks that as bitcoin continues to mature, it will likely decouple from other trends, too. “The correlation was higher last cycle. This cycle, even if Bitcoin is not correlated in the wrong way, let's say the stock market is going up and Bitcoin is not going up. In some ways it's a good sign.”

Instead, bitcoin has been traded more like high-risk equity, which from a fundamentals perspective doesn’t make a ton of sense.

This is a result of the industry, and its userbase, slowly maturing. “There are new types of players that are entering,” Ali said. “I think as the market matures more and more, it will arc toward the fundamentals to what Bitcoin fundamentally is. “Other trading firms will start doing what the data says, not what the fundamentals are saying.”

Despite the changes, Ali remains firmly bullish that bitcoin will hit the million-dollar milestone by 2030. His rationale? Bitcoin’s relative position against gold and its limited reach globally.

“I pretty much believe in two things there: One is, I try to look at the relative market cap to gold. So at its peak, Bitcoin has been at around 12% of gold's market cap, which, in the long term I believe it's way more valuable than gold and easier to transfer,” Ali said.

Secondly, the number of people and institutions accessing bitcoin is still relatively small. While not everyone is jumping on the bitcoin-train, even a fraction of the global market doing so could result in more price discovery, he added. So if distribution grows, so can bitcoin’s price.

Alongside this, another shift Ali sees for bitcoin is cultural: Holders are starting to care about yield as bitcoin’s price swings aren’t as big as they used to be, which makes a 5% yield per year very appealing. That is now driving new financial primitives on bitcoin, especially among institutions.

“Bitcoin is not seeing traction as a general-purpose, programing layer or even NFTs and these other types of use cases,” Ali said. “Bitcoin is seeing traction as pristine collateral. People don't want to sell it.”