Wall Street's Own Math Says Bitcoin Hits $3.6 Million

From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1623

The Numbers

Bitcoin held near $81K through a week of AI trade jitters that rattled everything else in markets.

The News

Bitwise raised its 10 year Bitcoin forecast to $1.6 million by 2036, a 34.3% annual growth rate, up from last year's call of $1.3 million by 2035 at 28.3%. Its bull case now reaches $3.67 million. Its own bear case, the one where almost nothing goes right, still lands at $130,686. For context, JP Morgan's own estimate puts Bitcoin's decade ahead closer to a 10% annual rate.

The math behind it is blunt. Institutional investors control roughly $147 trillion in assets, per Boston Consulting Group. If they allocate just 1% to 5% of that to Bitcoin over the next decade, that's $1.5 trillion to $7.4 trillion in new demand. Bitcoin's entire new supply from mining is only about $14 billion a year.

That's not a forecast problem. That's a math problem, and only price solves it.

Christine Lagarde announced she will step down as ECB president on February 7, 2027, nine months before her term ends, clearing the way for European leaders to pick her successor ahead of France's presidential election next spring.

In her goodbye video, she called her seven years "a source of great pride" and said she leaves an ECB "fit for the future," including price stability and financial stability among her accomplishments. She also had to address online chatter directly, posting that the bandages visible on her face were from "a small surgery earlier in the week." Meanwhile eurozone bond markets are under strain and affordability protests have spread across the continent she says she stabilized.

If price stability was the mandate, Europe is still waiting to see it delivered.

The Culture

Galaxy Research's Alex Thorne laid out the technical case live on the show. Bitcoin reclaiming its 50 week moving average after 20 or more weeks below it has never preceded a new bear market low. This cycle spent 44 weeks under it before reclaiming it five to six weeks ago.

The Q2 13F filings back it up. Macro and multi strat funds like Brevan Howard, Millennium, D.E. Shaw and Capula slashed their Bitcoin ETF positions, some by more than 70%. The buyers were longer term money: Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council.

Thorne's other point: the four year cycle still held on timing, the bottom landed a few months early rather than late, but each bear market keeps getting shallower. This one dropped 53% against historical declines near 80%. Attention has shifted to tokenization and stablecoins instead of Bitcoin, and Thorne says that pattern has historically marked good buying windows precisely because the crowd is looking elsewhere.

The tourists always come back. They're just not here yet.