Bitwise sees bitcoin returning 5 times US stocks through 2036

Bitwise Asset Management expects bitcoin to generate about five times the annual return of US stocks through 2036.

Its new 10-year outlook, published Wednesday, has bitcoin compounding at 34.3% a year vs. 6.7% for US equities, and increases the price target to $1.6 million from $1.3 million.

The equities number is just an average of long-term forecasts by JPMorgan, PGIM, BlackRock and Vanguard, and is included in Bitwise’s 2027 Bitcoin Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions. Private equity, the next-best asset in that table, gets 10.8%.

The table ranks bitcoin as the highest-performing and most volatile major asset. The forecast starts from bitcoin’s ~$83,557 price on Sept. 30, and bitcoin was trading near $80,000 on Wednesday.

“We are more bullish on bitcoin today than we were last year,” Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said in a statement. He cited the shallow four-year pullback, progress on regulation and the surge in demand for hard assets like gold.

Same model, bigger markets lift the target to $1.6 million

Last year’s edition forecast $1.3 million by 2035 and 28.3% annual growth. Bitwise re-ran the same model with new data, holding bitcoin’s share of each market fixed, Hougan wrote in a client memo.

Bitwise’s 2036 estimate for the store-of-value market is now $110 trillion, up from $91 trillion, and for institutional investment it’s $303 trillion, up from $216 trillion.

Base case: 25% of store-of-value assets and 1% of institutional assets into bitcoin. The bear case is 2.5% store-of-value share at $130,686 and the bull case is 50% store-of-value share at $3.67 million.

Bitwise puts today’s institutional assets at ~$147 trillion and expects 1%-5% in bitcoin over the decade. Those allocations would mean $1.5 trillion to $7.4 trillion in demand.

Mining creates about $14 billion of new bitcoin each year.

Some 20.1 million coins, 95.7% of the 21 million cap, are already in circulation.

Volatility forecast drops to 27.8% from 32.9%

Bitcoin shed 53.4% from its peak of $126,080 in October 2025 to $58,717 on June 30. If the low holds, Bitwise says, that would mark the shallowest cyclical retracement on record, following prior drops of 86%, 84% and 77%.

Hougan said much of the money flowing into store-of-value assets was being soaked up by gold, and that ETF buying slowed. But institutions persisted in adding exposure throughout the entire drawdown, he wrote, and bitcoin’s share of the store-of-value market grew to more than 5% from less than 1% a decade ago.

Bitwise also trimmed its 10-year volatility forecast to 27.8% from 32.9%. Average correlation with US stocks is projected to be 0.43.

“Bitcoin will likely remain a volatile asset with sharp downturns, but all signs point to these swings weakening as institutional adoption deepens,” said Head of Research Ryan Rasmussen in the statement.

Quantum computing, AI-driven mathematical advances and regulatory reversal top the firm’s risk list. Bitwise oversees over $14 billion in client assets across more than 70 products.

JPMorgan Asset Management was much more conservative in its first-ever long-term bitcoin forecast on Oct. 19, projecting a 10% annual return and 55% volatility, Cryptopolitan reported. Hougan welcomed the inclusion but said the 55% figure was too high.

Back in March, Hougan said bitcoin could reach $1 million by capturing a large share of a $38 trillion store-of-value market.