The consensus that Bitcoin has matured into “digital gold” faces a brand new boundary on Wall Avenue. It has little to do with day-to-day worth fluctuations and every thing to do with the distant way forward for computing.
Two outstanding strategists named Wooden are at present providing diametrically opposed roadmaps to the world’s largest world allocator of crypto belongings.
On January 16, Jefferies’ Christopher Wooden eradicated the agency’s long-standing publicity to Bitcoin, citing the existential risk posed by quantum computing.
In the meantime, ARK Make investments’s Cathie Wooden urges buyers to disregard the technical issues and concentrate on the asset’s obvious lack of correlation with conventional markets.
This divergence highlights an essential evolution in how institutional buyers will underwrite crypto belongings in 2026. The talk is not nearly whether or not Bitcoin is a speculative token or a retailer of worth.
We have moved into extra complicated calculations round viability, governance, and the precise varieties of hedges that buyers imagine they’re shopping for.
quantum exit
Christopher Wooden, world head of fairness technique at Jefferies, constructed a popularity for manipulating market sentiment together with his publication Greed & Worry.
His newest transfer is to fully take away the ten% Bitcoin allocation from his mannequin portfolio, considerably lowering two years of institutional accumulation.
Within the reallocation, Jefferies moved 10% of its Bitcoin sleeve into belongings with outdated tales, 5% into bodily gold and 5% into gold mining shares.
This rationale is rooted in tail danger moderately than rapid market tendencies. Wooden argued that advances in quantum computing might finally undermine the encryption that protects the Bitcoin community.
Whereas most buyers nonetheless base their accusations of quantum threats on “science initiatives,” Jefferies treats that chance as a disqualifier for annuity-style long-term capital.
This worry is being validated amongst expertise specialists who argue that the risk timeline is compressing quicker than the market realizes.
Charles Edwards, founding father of Capriol, has claimed that quantum computer systems might beat Bitcoin in simply 2-9 years with out upgrades, and with a excessive chance within the 4-5 yr vary.
Edwards describes the market as coming into a “quantum occasion horizon.” This can be a important threshold the place the frontier danger of hacking is roughly equal to the time required to succeed in consensus on the improve and carry out the rollout.
In Jeffries’ framework, the premise of quantum pc safety relies on cryptographic primitives which might be weak to future highly effective machines, with the disagreeable actuality that quantum computer systems will in the future be capable of crack Bitcoin.
Particular threats embrace an attacker “harvesting” and storing the uncovered public key now and decrypting the non-public key as soon as the {hardware} is mature.
Estimates counsel that greater than 4 million BTC are held in weak addresses as a consequence of reuse or outdated codecs. This leaves a “harvest now, decrypt later” assault vector that may probably compromise a big portion of the full provide.
Quantum computing is just not a direct risk to Bitcoin
Grayscale, one of many largest digital asset managers, is attempting to floor the market dialogue in 2026 by labeling quantum vulnerabilities as this yr’s “purple purple herring.”
The evaluation means that whereas the risk is actual, it’s unlikely to drive costs increased within the quick time period.
Contemplating this, Grayscale argued that in the long run, most blockchains and far of the broader financial system will want post-quantum upgrades anyway.
This view is in line with developments throughout the crypto sector.
Andre Dragosch, head of analysis at Bitwise Europe, additionally refuted the speculation of “imminent doom” by highlighting the massive computational hole between present expertise and viable assaults.
Whereas justifying issues about older wallets, Dragosh maintains that the community itself remains to be very sturdy.
He wrote:
“Bitcoin is at present operating at one zetahash per second, which is the equal of over one million El Capitan-class supercomputers. That is an order of magnitude past the attain of at the moment’s quantum machines, and much more than is predicted within the foreseeable future.”
Within the case of Bitcoin
Contemplating the above, ARK Make investments additional strengthens the case that Bitcoin belongs in a contemporary portfolio exactly as a result of it behaves in another way than others.
In her 2026 outlook word, ARK’s Cathie Wooden centered on correlations, not ideology.
Her arguments are medical. Bitcoin’s revenue stream has remained much less correlated with main asset lessons since 2020, thus providing a approach to enhance portfolio effectivity.
ARK supported this view with a correlation matrix utilizing weekly returns from January 2020 to January 2026. The info reveals that Bitcoin has a correlation of 0.14 with gold and 0.06 with bonds.
Maybe most shocking, this desk reveals that the correlation between the S&P 500 and bonds is increased than the correlation between Bitcoin and gold.
Wooden makes use of this information to argue that Bitcoin must be seen as a precious diversifier for asset allocators searching for increased returns per unit of danger within the coming years.
This represents a refined however essential shift in messaging. ARK is reconfiguring Bitcoin from a “new model of gold” to an “uncorrelated return stream with uneven upside.”
Redefining hedging
For buyers following the break up between two of the market’s most outstanding strategists, what’s instantly clear is that Bitcoin is not damaged. It’s that the institutional narrative is maturing right into a extra demanding one.
Jefferies is successfully saying that hedging, which can require controversial protocol-level transitions, is just not the identical as bodily gold, although each belongings can rise in the identical macro regime.
It is because gold doesn’t require changes, upgrades, or governance to stay a sound asset. Bitcoin, however, is a hedge that in the end is determined by its capability to adapt.
The counterargument is that conventional finance faces extra of a short-term disaster from quantum computing than from Bitcoin.
Dragosh stated:
“Banks rely closely on long-lived RSA/ECC keys for authentication and interbank communications. If quantum machines can break these, it would allow coordinated assaults a lot quicker than any actual risk to Bitcoin’s decentralized structure.”
With this in thoughts, ARK is successfully saying that portfolio diversification advantages can justify a BTC place, even when the asset remains to be in its infancy.
The query at stake in these instances is subsequently whether or not Bitcoin can reliably orchestrate a post-quantum transition with out disrupting the social consensus that provides it financial worth.
