Investors soon will prefer trading digital gold to the real deal, Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, told Bloomberg TV in a Thursday afternoon interview.
Although Bitcoin’s current market cap isn’t yet one-tenth of gold’s —$1.21 trillion compared with $13.79 trillion—the top cryptocurrency by market cap, he noted, soon could supersede a store of wealth known the world over.
“It will be, and it won’t wait. It will be larger than gold,” Novogratz said.
Of the estimated $85 trillion in baby boomer wealth, the majority is managed by registered investors, approximately half of which have access to the 10 recently approved spot Bitcoin ETFs, he says. If platforms like BlackRock and Fidelity, largely powered by baby boomer wealth, encourage their clients to allocate a minimal 1% to 3% of their assets to the cryptocurrency, that amounts to trillions in new liquidity.
“This is probably the first time in the history of Bitcoin that we have a true price discovery,” he said, as never before have both institutional and retail investors had access to it.
Novogratz also predicts that once the bubble of boomer wealth passes down a generation, allocations to digital assets should only accelerate.
“For every Charlie Munger—God rest his soul—who passes away, that money is finding its way to Gen Z and millennials, and they feel much more comfortable with digital gold than old, clunky gold,” he said.
However, Novogratz did caution that a Bitcoin price correction could unfold in the coming days or weeks: “I would say we’ve gotten to very frothy, frothy levels.” But he doesn’t see Bitcoin dipping below the mid-$50,000s before climbing again.
Bitcoin spiked to $63,968 on Wednesday, edging closer to its all-time high of about $69,000, a move that’s exhausted crypto providers like Coinbase, which suffered outages as app and site traffic surged.
Demand has been bolstered by colossal net inflows into the ETFs, which set a new record for daily trading volumes on Wednesday, with more than $7.6 billion in activity, according to Bloomberg data. The day before, BlackRock saw $520 million flood into its iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) ETF, the largest daily inflow yet.
Moreover, on April 19, Bitcoin is poised to undergo a so-called halving, which cuts the daily supply of newly minted coins by 50%, another tailwind at play. This event has historically caused prices to soar, increasing on average by 14% in the run-up.
But the way the cycle is performing is already “really different” from the previous three halvings, because we’re nearing the all-time high almost two months before the event, said Matteo Greco, an analyst at Fineqia International. “It’s not something that historically has happened before,” he said, adding that Bitcoin typically peaks six to 12 months after a halving.
The ETF inflows averaged $500 million on Monday and Tuesday, according to Bloomberg data, which equates to about 10,000 Bitcoin being bought per day. However, miners are only minting 900 Bitcoins, which will soon be 450, Markus Thielen, CEO of 10x Research, told Fortune.
“The demand has been satisfied by the inventory placed on exchanges, but this inventory is also dwindling rather quickly,” he said.
